Paradis
AI & Technology Investment Research
Vertical, domain-specific SaaS companies that control proprietary data should keep thriving despite Claude's spread, making Salesforce, ServiceNow, Adobe and Palantir a turnaround play. Salesforce's Agentforce has 9.5k+ paid deals at $2 per autonomous action, ServiceNow's Now Assist ACV doubled to $600M+, Adobe has 24B+ Firefly generations with IP indemnity as a massive moat, and Palantir's US commercial revenue rose 137%. x.comÂ
Adobe, Salesforce and ServiceNow still generate massive cash flow, push deeper into AI and sit at the center of enterprise operations. Three of the biggest SaaS names remain beaten up in 2026; their valuations have been crushed, but the long-term opportunity may not have been. The market has swung way too far against them. x.comÂ
Enterprise demand for sovereign AI favors Palantir's transformation model. In a two-pronged AI economy, businesses can retain their IP and use low-cost open models while frontier labs compete for the last increment of intelligence. x.comÂ
Palantir's reliance on pay-as-you-go service with refunds makes customer cancellations and sudden earnings declines or write-downs a serious risk as AI and high SaaS prices pressure the business. Its 10-Q warns of these risks. Anthropic can and will easily replace Palantir with an all-in-one platform under Democratic control of the legislative branches. x.com x.comÂ
AI has erased engineering complexity as a SaaS moat, so software survives only with compliance or data lock-in. Tyler Technologies, Veeva and Guidewire are anchored in government, pharma and insurance rules, where leaving means a compliance audit; Veeva's revenue rose 16% while its stock fell 25%. Palantir's ontology locks in customer data. Salesforce, Workday, Adobe and ServiceNow are seat-based with neither moat, and BlackLine and nCino, though regulated, never went AI-native. x.comÂ
The 'SaaSpocalypse' narrative is wrong because AI makes replacing enterprise software more expensive, not cheaper, leaving beaten-down SaaS stocks at once-in-a-lifetime entry levels. Replicating ServiceNow would take some 40,000 engineers to match 20 years of code, and even AI coding would raise costs, since tokens are not free and model labs lack the capacity to be enterprises' database layer. LLMs are pattern recognizers that can fail catastrophically on new problems. x.com x.comÂ
DRAM, GPU and CPU costs must be pushing basic cloud-compute prices higher, so Salesforce, ServiceNow and Palantir are inflating rather than growing. September CPI data showed software and accessories up 28.4% year over year. x.comÂ
Palantir may be undervalued because the market values it as a software company while its opportunity is much bigger. It spans AI deployment, government contracts, enterprise adoption and mission-critical data infrastructure, and expensive stocks can stay expensive when the business keeps expanding. x.comÂ
The SaaSpocalypse narrative makes less and less sense for Salesforce, ServiceNow and Palantir, because enterprises will deploy AI agents that use software tools rather than build their own software. Jensen Huang says agents won't replace tools but will use them, and NVIDIA has deployed so many agents that its tool usage is actually increasing. x.comÂ
Application software makers Adobe, Salesforce and ServiceNow are sneaky losers from the AI-lab slowdown, because frontier labs can now focus on their customers instead of AGI. Lab leaders including Elon Musk, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have pivoted to warning that AI could kill you, which, with AI already polling badly, will make it much harder to attract investment. The fallout could be real. x.comÂ
Salesforce's poor M&A is literally half the reason its multiple stays low. Slack and Informatica are cited as examples, with Braze raised as a question; AI making Tableau obsolete in a few years would be a separate risk, not itself poor M&A. x.comÂ
