One of the biggest things going for Salesforce, Workday, and the other SaaS companies threatened by AI has simply been inertia.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told us in May that the market was overreacting, at least in the short term, to the SaaSpocalypse. “It’s easy for me to vibe code a BS to-do app for myself,” he said on an episode of Compound Interest. “Enterprises are much more obsessed with getting things right. And so I think the pace of change in enterprise, especially large enterprise, is going to be slow.”
Starbucks may be an early indication that that tide is changing. The CTO of the $120 billion company, which spends about $400 million a year on software, said the consumer giant is now developing in-house AI tools to replace a bunch of inventory, maintenance, and other software it relies on Microsoft and IBM for, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
“There’s clear opportunities to reduce the spend in software,” he told an internal forum.