OpenAI's new Presence tool pushed the company deeper into corporate software, and shares of established SaaS vendors fell in response. Workday, Atlassian, and HubSpot dropped the most as OpenAI's move deepened worries about AI agents displacing established software.
Software stocks dropped after OpenAI revealed Presence on Wednesday, a product built to make AI agents more effective for corporate customers. Workday, Atlassian, and HubSpot tumbled as the release ramped up OpenAI's competition with established software vendors.
What Presence does
Presence lets companies set guardrails, permissions, and policies around how AI agents use company data, and it targets work in customer support, sales, and internal processes. The tool extends OpenAI's push to build software capabilities and governance on top of its AI models, moving it further into the software-as-a-service market where established firms have grown wary of AI coding tools and agents.
The sell-off
The declines landed on Wednesday and Thursday, during a stretch already strained by an oil price surge, rising bond yields, and worrying Big Tech earnings. Since Wednesday morning, share prices fell for Workday (-9.9%), Atlassian (-11.8%), HubSpot (-12.7%), Salesforce (-7.7%), and Okta (-4.2%).
TD Cowen analysts wrote that the Presence announcement was likely a major reason for a 3% sell-off in the IGV software index on Wednesday, with further declines on Thursday. Derrick Wood, an analyst on the team, told Business Insider that he sees the customer service and sales fields as particularly exposed among companies that overlap with Presence.
Echoes of October
Wood pointed back to early October for precedent, when a series of OpenAI blog posts showcased internal AI tools that resembled SaaS offerings and sent HubSpot, DocuSign, and ZoomInfo reeling. TD Cowen had called that reaction overblown at the time, but pointed to the market's concern around "AI eating software". OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Source: Business Insider
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