There may be hope yet for legacy software companies in an agentic world: Making customer data more easily ingestible by AI.
“If you have Snowflake and DataBricks and your data is in good order, you will go faster,” Anthropic Chief Commercial Officer Paul Smith told Semafor when asked whether AI models are improving so rapidly it renders the Saas giants of the last decade useless. But if they don’t, he said, Anthropic can help them anyway.
Shares in Snowflake and other software companies have been pummeled as investors question the viability of these companies in the AI era. Further up the stack, one investor in ThoughtSpot, which uses agents to help enterprises analyze large swaths of complex data and has raised $800 million from major investors, told Semafor they’re concerned the company will be outmaneuvered as Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s models improve.
Models like Claude currently struggle with complicated inquiries pulling from various sources of data, but they will be able to handle that analysis within two years, the investor said. There’s still time for ThoughtSpot to jump ahead, they said, but if its business remains the same, “that’s where it’s in trouble.”
The company has more than 1,000 customers, and 34 that are spending more than $1 million each year with ThoughtSpot, CEO Ketan Karkhanis told Semafor. “Better models aren’t replacing our work,” he said, adding that as models get better, they require the more sophisticated orchestration that ThoughtSpot provides. On whether this can be done by frontier AI companies themselves, he said, “I would welcome all competition.”