Приговор без суда: почему инвесторы хоронят софт из-за ИИ

The software market now resembles a scene from a disaster film, where everyone runs for the exits without looking at the road. Investors staged a massive selloff of technology company stocks that just yesterday were considered a "safe haven" and an example of stable growth. Analysts at JPMorgan Chase & Co. found the perfect metaphor for what is happening: the software industry has been sentenced to the death penalty before the trial even began. This is a rare case where the market does not wait for proof of guilt or falling revenue, but acts preemptively, guided by pure existential fear of artificial intelligence.

To understand the scale of the drama, one must recall what the prosperity of the last ten years was built on. The SaaS model (software as a service) thrived on selling licenses for each workstation. The more employees a company has, the more money Salesforce, Adobe, or Workday receives. But now generative AI is calling this very mathematics into question. If one person with Claude or GPT-4 can do the work of five, companies will inevitably start cutting the number of paid accounts. The market is already factoring this scenario into stock prices without waiting for quarterly reports. Investors believe that AI will not just supplement software, but completely replace it, turning complex interfaces into a simple chat window.

This panic reveals a deep rift in the technology sector. On one side are "hardware" giants like Nvidia, which sell picks and shovels during the gold rush and feel just fine. On the other are application developers who suddenly found themselves in the role of carriage makers in the age of the first automobiles. JPMorgan notes that the gloomy mood on the stock exchange has become chronic. Any news about progress in LLMs is now perceived as another nail in the coffin of traditional software. Even companies that are actively implementing neural networks in their products don't get credit from Wall Street.

Why is this happening right now? The point is that the effect of AI has ceased to be theoretical. We are seeing the first signs of how corporations are reallocating budgets. Money that once went into buying corporate software is now going toward renting cloud capacity to train proprietary models or paying for API access. This is a zero-sum game: to feed "smart" AI, you have to put "dumb" software on a diet. Investors see that revenue growth rates at cloud giants are slowing, and they draw a logical, if harsh, conclusion: the old model is broken.

However, there is also a touch of irony in the "verdict before trial" position. The market is often prone to excess, and JPMorgan hints that the current selloff may be overblown. Software companies are not sitting idle; they are shifting from selling "tools" to selling "results." Instead of taking money for access to buttons, they are beginning to implement AI agents that perform specific tasks. But until this transition is backed by solid numbers in financial reports, skepticism will dominate. Wall Street wants to see not promises of AI integration, but actual protection against the cannibalization of its own business.

The situation is complicated by the fact that barriers to entry in the software development industry are crumbling. If previously it took years and dozens of programmers to create a competitor to a conventional accounting service, now AI coding makes it possible to do it many times faster and cheaper. This creates a threat of decommoditization: software becomes too easy to produce, and therefore less valuable. Investors fear we are entering an era of "free" or ultra-cheap software, where margins will fall to zero.

The bottom line: the market has rendered software a verdict of "guilty of inefficiency." Will companies be able to appeal by implementing AI agents, or are we truly seeing the sunset of the SaaS era?