Software companies fight back against fears that AI will kill them

Oracle’s Mike Sicilia is the latest software CEO to wade in to the ​debate on whether artificial intelligence tools that heavily automate human tasks will mean the demise of his industry.

Oracle’s Mike Sicilia is the latest software CEO to wade in to the ​debate on whether artificial intelligence tools that heavily automate human tasks will mean the demise of his industry. His verdict was a resounding “no.”

“You’ve all heard ... that new companies coding ‌quickly using AI will spell the death of SaaS (software as a service),” he told analysts on a conference call on Tuesday. “I ​don’t agree with that at all. I do think that AI tools and their coding capabilities would be a threat if we ⁠weren’t adopting them, but we are, and very rapidly.”

Sicilia was responding to Wall Street concerns that new AI tools can now perform some of the tasks that traditional software companies’ products were built for, such as organising customer information or guiding people through business processes.

Those worries led to a nearly $1 trillion rout in software stocks last month after heavyweight ‌AI startup Anthropic introduced AI plugins for its Claude Cowork agent, a digital assistant that can automate such tasks. CEOs of software companies have since used their post-earnings conference calls to fight back.

Sicilia also laid out a case that Oracle was ahead of its smaller rival ‌Salesforce, saying his company was using AI to actually build new products and automate full business processes, not just add AI features on top ‌of ⁠existing tools.

Salesforce, for its part, has offered a different defence, with CEO Marc Benioff last month telling analysts that his company will ⁠outlast any so-called SaaS-pocalypse, a term for last month’s share rout that hit software-as-a-service companies.