00:00 Josh
Do you think this earning season, Bob, does it potentially change the narrative? Does it change the story for software?
00:04 Bob
I think it does, Josh. And and it’s because look, there was an over reaction early on because there was this sense of all people, you know, the SAScalypse and people aren’t going to need these software tools anymore. And the reality is that, you know, maybe several years from now we’ll be doing software a lot differently. In fact, I’m convinced we will. But that’s a long way off. and it takes organizations a really long time to dramatically change how they use the tools that they already have. There are huge investments in enterprises all over the world in these big software tools and they’re shifting and thinking about how to deploy them in different ways. So yes, there is some sort of an impact, but there was such a negative reaction, it was, you know, now we’re coming back to reality. Then the question becomes, all right, now, how do these software companies evolve to make themselves part of the agentic AI story. And they’re all starting to do that, right? Everybody is starting to talk about how they can integrate their tools as agentic elements in a larger workflow, sorry. In other words, how people can automate more of these processes. And you’re going to see a lot more of that happening, I think with these software tools.
01:21 Josh
How do I try to distinguish now, Bob, between who’s going to be an AI winner and who’s going to be an AI victim potentially.
01:31 Bob
There’s a couple of things there I think are very clear. One is cyber security and and security related stuff is going to be a huge issue. and the agentic uh things that are going on are driving even more of that. When you’ve got millions and millions of agents out there. So you’ve got your traditional, uh you’ve got your Ciscos, you’ve got your Palo Alto networks, you’ve got a bunch of these other big uh software players, uh Crowdstrike and all these other folks, you know, on the cyber security side. I think there’s going to be opportunities there. I think you will see, I mean, productivity- based tools are still going to be there, right? The stuff that Google and and Microsoft are doing, that’s it’s embedded into how people do their work. I still think those kinds of things are important. So, I I think there’s a lot of those. I think we will see some new interesting opportunities come up as we develop again, more agentic workflows and other types of things. How to call those, I’ll be honest with you is is pretty tough.
