Data guzzler threatens software’s last moat

Enterprise software vendors like Salesforce derive some of their power and profitability from sheer inertia. Their tools store and organize data that is crucial to day-to-day business functions. Despite the industry's median enterprise value as a multiple of trailing-twelve-month revenue nearly halving over the past year, the argument goes that this entanglement will make them hard to switch out.

AI might offer a countervailing push. So-called agents, or language models that can autonomously complete multi-step tasks, represent the most plausible path to profitable, labor-and-cost-saving advances from chatbot technology. To realize this value, they require unfettered access to data and tools from one centralized spot. Naturally, this moves the center of corporate gravity to platforms like Databricks.