Noah
Stock Investor & Trader, US Equities
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
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
Zeta Global, ServiceNow, Datadog and CrowdStrike look increasingly attractive among software names as AI disrupts applications: businesses with proprietary data that build on AI and deliver intelligence and measurable outcomes could win. Cybersecurity valuations remain a concern. x.comÂ
CrowdStrike is not worth buying at 40x revenue, and there are very few plausible scenarios in which it is ever worth that multiple. AI is not overhyped, but the argument that massive tech disruption justifies the price echoes 2021, when Covid was said to be changing how people worked. As in 300 years of technological change, there are likely far fewer losers than expected. x.com x.comÂ
CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks benefit from AI because it creates more security problems, so companies will need more advanced cybersecurity, not less. More than half of enterprise AI use happens outside IT oversight. Per JPMorgan, both are in good shape after Anthropic launched its Claude Mythos Preview security tool: instead of competing with them, Anthropic made them partners, which JPMorgan reads as a sign established vendors are essential to AI-driven defense, not replaceable by it. … Show more
SaaS is alive: AI is not replacing entrenched enterprise platforms such as Palantir, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Shopify, Datadog, Salesforce, Snowflake, AppLovin, MongoDB and Zeta. Switching costs and risks are too high, and no credible CTO will swap ServiceNow for a stitched-together AI replacement. Using AI themselves should expand margins by cutting headcount bloat and lifting revenue through AI features. ServiceNow has 600+ customers with ACV over $5M, up 22%, and rose 23% in a week. x.comÂ
Hyperscaler cloud integration and frontier AI labs could take a fair bit of cybersecurity's economics. Rising AI-token budgets also make higher cyber spending a stretch. Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike and Cloudflare have nearly $1 trillion in market cap on less than $20 billion in revenue; even high-quality Palo Alto and Cloudflare look too expensive, while Okta looks indefensibly expensive. The theme has real demand, but these valuations look too high in the short to medium term. x.comÂ
Microsoft is a relative beneficiary of slower, safety-focused frontier AI, mainly through cybersecurity, though to a lesser degree than CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. Agentic AI risk from misbehaving internal agents and adversaries should make security every enterprise's top priority, driving upgrades to best-of-breed providers and much larger budgets. A paced frontier also lowers extreme tail risk for software broadly. Compute plans should not change, as supply stays severely constrained. … Show more
Cybersecurity stocks have a powerful long-term tailwind because more AI means more complexity, more attack surface and more need for security. CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, Fortinet, Okta and Rubrik moved up strongly premarket after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay arguing the AI industry should slow down, with Anthropic committing to give third-party evaluators permanent access to verify its safety measures. The market may be connecting those dots. x.comÂ
Palantir is a worse business than CrowdStrike, Cloudflare and Datadog and is at the tail end of its acceleration cycle, while the cybersecurity supercycle may just be starting. So its fall to half CrowdStrike's and Snowflake's EV-to-operating-income multiple, noted by @CoorsLightCEO, makes sense once anchoring is removed. All of them are overvalued, though. x.comÂ
The death of software was greatly exaggerated: companies are building AI into their own products and making them more valuable, so major platforms like ServiceNow, Salesforce and CrowdStrike aren't going away. Smaller niche players may struggle, but the market may have been far too bearish on software, and Anthropic's IPO won't change that. From their 2026 lows, ServiceNow is up 84%, Salesforce 83% and CrowdStrike 173%. x.comÂ
