CRM
Salesforce, Inc.
stock NYSE

Bought PATH and CRM after hours Friday. Hoping they pop this week.

Michael bury bought CRM

This is exactly right. Its funny because mainly i see two types of sentiments on reddit. It's either "AI is going to change everything. Tomorrow there will be no UI. Every SaaS company will fail, everyone is just going to vibe-code and make agents!" or "AI is worthless and can't even spell strawberry, haha".
Both of them miss the point.
The move in enterprise is, as you say, painfully slow, and boomers are at the wheel and will be for the next 5-10 years. But its coming. And its like that Hemmingway quote that often used about change, that says it happens "gradually and then all at once". Which is probably true here as well.
And honest I get the boomers. Nobody wants to be the guy that approved going away from CRM, SalesForce, Etc. and move to some risky untested system that was vibe-coded by a bunch of unknown people who can't even tell you the difference between CapEx and OpEx. It's like the old saying, Nobody gets fired for buying IBM and its going to be true for a while. The interesting thing going forward is that "Buying IBM" is going to be buying Copilot licenses or other LLM services provided by the existing large solution providers.

I work in enterprise software and have done for decades and I'm very bullish on enterprise software. This is sometimes known as SaaS but I'm particularly focused on what enterprises use rather than microbusiness/home software.
I've bought into the following companies: Adobe, Salesforce, Veeva Systems and ServiceNow.
The basis of my thesis is that over and over and over again, I read people talking about AI killing these software products by people who don't understand how good vibe coding really is, how much of a proportion of cost is coding vs everything else, and factors like cost of converting existing data, or the value of ecosystems. To explain that last one, if you're using Photoshop, you can hire a Photoshop guy. You can get Photoshop training. You can buy Photoshop plugins. The clients you send designs to will expect it in PSD.
A lot of software out there is core product with APIs, plugins, etc etc. Companies don't build their own CRM. They pay £10-50 per user per month, and if they need it to do something it doesn't do, they hire someone like me to enhance it with a 4 week software project. That's expensive per day, but far, far cheaper than building from scratch.
Look at the resumes of the people talking about AI and enterprise software. Most of them are clueless journalists. Or they're people in AI companies talking them up.
The most likely effect with AI is companies like Adobe and Shopify adding it to their tools. You've already got the base tool, add AI features, like image generation, or text descriptions for products.
I've even written in detail about things like why the Claude Mythos cybersecurity thing isn't that big a deal. People lost their minds about that, cybersecurity stocks down 10%, but it has almost no impact on corporate software or cybersecurity companies because it's about memory-unsafe software which is only a small proportion of enterprise software.

Generally, yes. I think some horizontal SaaS is more impervious than others, though.
Eg I would bet on CRM and NOW before ADBE.

Why would you have to spend days trying to connect CRM to a spreadsheet? lol this is the most simple use case and doesn’t even require building anything

$ADOBE $CRM $TTD

You have no clue how engrained Salesforce is in most businesses. My company would need 1 year and a team of 20 people to move off of Salesforce into a different CRM,

I don’t know man, I think this is it. Why would I want to spend days trying to connect my CRM API to a spreadsheet with a webhook when Claude can just take care of all that?
Also it’s all just garbage code, legacy CRM APIs are full of bugs. Which again, had it not been for Claude, I would spend hours and hours trying to untangle.

SaaS until IGV eft make all time highs….!
Why?
We use Shopify use our firm and software like CRM and also TEAM. I can tell you no one from our company ever thinks about to change these products even if someone offer us way lower prices.
It’s that sticky.

CRM

When you're managing billions of other people's money, you're more likely to avoid situations where the bear thesis can completely kill the company. Even if most sensible investors realize that the likelihood of CRM and ADBE being rapidly disrupted is low, they don't want to be remembered as the guy who bet on horse carriages after the automobile was released.

MSFT is already going after CRM with Dynamics. MSFT can legit go after anyone they want. The opposite is not likely true.

CRM

Michael Burry bought CRM ADBE

Not all SAAS are worth buying. I'm adding up NOW, MSFT and CRM. ADOBE is done. Their suite has no moat and could be replaced by AI.

Sure, what you're describing is the switching moat, which is a real thing. But that generally mainly slows down decline, rather than provide long term growth.
For a new company getting a new CRM system, it has gone from "pay enormous amounts to Salesforce and that's your only option", to having tons of cheaper options. You can no go for a free open source solution and just manage it in house, you could go for open source but pay for hosting and service, or you could go with a cheaper startup that still does everything for you, etc. And even if you end up going with the legacy SaaS in the end anyway, you still have significantly more negotiating power in getting the price down since they're no longer a monopoly.
The market repricing isn't saying these companies are gonna completely gonna go away, if so the stock would be down 95%+, not 40% or whatever. I'd say they're being repriced from having a significant moat and near-monopoly position, to operating in a much more competitive market.
But I don't think this is gonna make a dent in revenue for at least another year or two, this has basically just gotten started and these companies mainly operate on long-term contracts. But the market is future looking so.

Our firm personally use CRM and all of our peers as well. It’s that sticky business model doesn’t matter what next company offer us, we ain’t gonna change anything.
We are in that situation where It’s like don’t touch it unless it’s working.

Both Berkshire and Li Lu have decades-long investing horizons, and SaaS companies don’t fit their criteria even before the AI challenges.
Josh Tarasoff, another value investor with long investing horizons, had held SaaS company stocks including MNDY, SHOP, CRM, and HUBS, but he has not held any SaaS stocks since Q1 2024.

Their point is that it might help a smaller company build a better version of salesforce much faster and with way fewer people, or it might mean that people at companies that use $CRM decide that the full featureset isn't useful and they vibe code their own with Claude/GPT/etc.
In the past, you paid SaaS companies to amortize the cost of software development so you get a service for cheap, as opposed to building it in house. This was because software development and maintenance was not easy and generally required a lot of smart white collar workers to execute. When the cost of building it gets lower and lower with AI, then the argument to outsource that product makes less and less sense.