I’ve never been an investor in NOW; however, it’s always been of interest. I hold a small position in PATH and, putting aside differences of approach, I’ll just say you’ve outlined exactly what my thoughts are around the agentification of enterprises.
The contextual visualisation of business processes and then identifying how and what can be agentified in a secure and compliant way is key. It seems that NOW understands that and, rather than solely developing in-house (despite having significant internal build capability), the smart choice in certain instances is to acquire in order to gain that knowledge and expertise more rapidly and defensibly.
An example I often tout is that the exec or higher management within a company has probably used ChatGPT (or Claude/Gemini) and realised that “AI,” in some capacity, can make their organisation more efficient and productive. However, they won’t fundamentally understand the intricate mechanics that weave together orchestration (systems integration), compliance, security, and outcome.
So, through a potentially arduous and/or unsuccessful process of agentic transformation, they inevitably realise they require the structured, secure, and enterprise-grade framework that NOW or PATH provide, not experimentation, but infrastructure.
I have rarely seen such a well analysed article, thx for your research. AI agents are coming fast but no one is managing them. Lots of companies are deploying AI agents across HR, IT, finance, etc. It is an ambitious goal for NOW to be the sole coordinator of that entire system. I agree with you that SaaS is not dead and many SaaS companies are financially robust enough to adapt - just not sure who will make the race.
I’ve never been an investor in NOW; however, it’s always been of interest. I hold a small position in PATH and, putting aside differences of approach, I’ll just say you’ve outlined exactly what my thoughts are around the agentification of enterprises.
The contextual visualisation of business processes and then identifying how and what can be agentified in a secure and compliant way is key. It seems that NOW understands that and, rather than solely developing in-house (despite having significant internal build capability), the smart choice in certain instances is to acquire in order to gain that knowledge and expertise more rapidly and defensibly.
An example I often tout is that the exec or higher management within a company has probably used ChatGPT (or Claude/Gemini) and realised that “AI,” in some capacity, can make their organisation more efficient and productive. However, they won’t fundamentally understand the intricate mechanics that weave together orchestration (systems integration), compliance, security, and outcome.
So, through a potentially arduous and/or unsuccessful process of agentic transformation, they inevitably realise they require the structured, secure, and enterprise-grade framework that NOW or PATH provide, not experimentation, but infrastructure.
Great read, very interesting 👍
What about the AI compute adoption significantly increase the SaaS compute cost?
Revenue/profit catches up later?
Investors simply dump the sector to avoid negative surprise?
It’s like CSPs profit growth will be under pressure next 2 years as massive IT hardware depreciation cost creeps up?
They need massive AI-driven cloud revenue growth to offset that expensive compute cost?
I have rarely seen such a well analysed article, thx for your research. AI agents are coming fast but no one is managing them. Lots of companies are deploying AI agents across HR, IT, finance, etc. It is an ambitious goal for NOW to be the sole coordinator of that entire system. I agree with you that SaaS is not dead and many SaaS companies are financially robust enough to adapt - just not sure who will make the race.