Goldman Sachs TMT trading expert Peter Callahan points out that the AI narrative within the software sector is shifting following this earnings season. Previously, the market was more concerned that generative AI would weaken the competitive advantages of traditional software companies. However, the data infrastructure and development tools sectors have begun to shift from an "AI headwind" to an "AI tailwind," with companies like Cloudflare, Palantir, Datadog, Twilio, and Atlassian receiving more attention. In contrast, whether traditional SaaS application companies can establish a similarly clear logic for benefiting from AI remains to be seen.
The underlying change is that AI commercialization is extending from model training to inference, agents, and automated applications. Cloudflare disclosed that non-human traffic has surpassed human traffic and predicts that if the current trend continues, machine-generated network requests will grow rapidly. This means that AI is not necessarily just a replacement for software companies: for platforms that host data, APIs, network traffic, security, and development tools, the increase in the number of agents and the frequency of calls can themselves become new sources of demand.
Therefore, the software industry is showing significant differentiation: whether AI is beneficial increasingly depends on whether a company is at the application layer or the infrastructure layer, and whether it can directly monetize the growth in AI traffic.
