After brutal sell-offs, IBM and Oracle get a glimmer of hope from Anthropic news
Anthropic’s latest announcement seems to be giving a lift to software companies the market was previously viewing as the walking disrupted.
Beleaguered business software stocks like IBM, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Oracle got a somewhat surprising lift from a flurry of headlines out of Anthropic early Tuesday, after the AI lab announced a series of new plug-ins allowing integrations with companies in a range of industries.
Reuters reports that “Anthropic said its new plug-ins were developed with partners, including LSEG, FactSet, Salesforce’s Slack, and DocuSign.”
Shares of such stocks bounced on the news. They’ve been battered for weeks, with each of the aforementioned companies losing anywhere from 19% to 29% of their value over the past month even after today’s bounce, as investors stared into a future of fruitless struggle for these companies before succumbing to AI mastery and ultimate disruption.
The growing sense of dread surrounding software stocks, underscored by this week’s slump based on nothing more than an analyst’s fictionalized riff on the dystopian future for the sector, suggests that Wall Street is more than willing to buy into the storyline of ruthless technological conquest pushed by Silicon Valley’s AI boosters. Earlier this month, a white paper by a former karaoke company turned trucking AI provider helped demolish billions of dollars of trucking market cap.
But Anthropic’s latest announcements can be read as something of an alternate pathway, suggesting that at least one AI lab’s goal is not to disrupt and destroy other business software giants, but rather to turn them into paying customers.
That would likely be an appealing option for the companies, as their own share prices would benefit from the sprinkling of AI pixie dust that an accommodation with, rather than a death struggle against, AI might bring.
Sure, there would be strategic risks of getting into bed with Anthropic, but after the ride these stocks have had over the last few weeks, those may be risks worth taking.
