(BFM Stock Exchange) – The sector suffered on Monday and Tuesday in Europe and the United States a fairly violent correction movement. Investors fear that the prowess of artificial intelligence make it possible to develop software consequences faster and at low costs.
Since the boom in the theme of artificial intelligence (AI) on the stock market in early 2023, investors have almost (if not more) endeavored to find the losers as the winners of this technological revolution.
Externalized customer relationship specialists were quickly identified as potential victims. The Teleperformance action (renowned since March ‘TP’) has thus regularly found itself under pressure.
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Especially when Fintech Klarna had unveiled, in early 2024, an AI assistant who would have been able to carry out the workload of 700 full -time equivalents with similar customer satisfaction. It turns out that these prowess was exaggerated and Klarna will recognize, a year later, that her agents in flesh were necessary to compensate for the errors of the AI in question and satisfy its customers.
More recently, investors have started to fear that the Boom of AI is upsetting the model of advertising agencies. Arthur Sadoun, the CEO of Publicis, himself told the analysts, in mid-July, that his sector faced “disruptions (disturbances, editor’s note)” linked to the acceleration of AI, adding that “AI threatens to trivialize the brands”. “AI risks seem to slow investments in the agency sector in general, and at Publicis in particular,” notes UBS, in a recent note.
Are the software publishers the next on the list? In any case, the market has been nervous in recent days.
“AI is devouring software”
Monday, several actions in the sector suffered from Wall Street. Adobe fell by more than 2%, Salesforce by 3.3%, workday of 3.8%. Especially Monday.com, a web and mobile project management application collapsed 29.8% after delivering perspectives deemed disappointing.
The movement spread to Europe on Tuesday. Dassault Systèmes, CAC 40 group specializing in product life cycle management software, has resisted relatively well. But the action still fell 2.4%, accusing the second largest withdrawal of the CAC 40.
SAP, the German champion of professional software and incidentally the first European capitalization (290 billion euros), suffered more, with a 6.96%dive. Sage, an accounting software company listed in London, lost 4.7%, while Nemetschek, a German group comparable to Dassault Systèmes, collapsed from 11.1% in Frankfurt.
Difficult to find an isolated trigger for this stock market mini-panic in the software sector. However, a note by Melius Research devoted to Adobe and cited by several media including Yahoo! Finance, caught a lot of noise.
The design office estimated that the switching from activity to AI was triggered “an beginning of contraction of the multiple scholarship holders” for companies specializing in the Saas, the “AS-A-Service software”, that is to say companies that market online software consequences.
“The world realizes that ‘AI is devouring software’,” even wrote Melius Research. The design office estimated that “almost everyone […] Can create such an efficient application that it can quickly and effectively compete with others “thanks to AI, which undermines the advantages of models based on subscription.
Software, “new fast food”?
“Software valuations remain under pressure due to the discourse on the death of software due to AI ‘, which should lead to continuous short -term volatility,” said RBC Capital Markets analysts on Tuesday, in a note cited by Bloomberg.
In a note published on Wednesday, UBS notes that “most” of its customers in the States “are now concerned that software is disrupted (less jobs of white collars with AI and therefore less licenses and subscriptions) with the threat represented by the SaaS developed internally”.
Enough to put investors on their guard. Especially since the child prodigies of AI have long teeth. Openai at least. Its general manager, Sam Altman, wrote in early August that the SaaS entered “soon in the era of fast fashion” because the AI will make it possible to produce more quickly and at a lower cost of applications.
During the presentation of the new OPENAI IA model, GPT-5, last week, Sam Altman gave a layer. According to UBS, the leader said that “this idea of software on request Ser (AI) a determining element of the GPT-5 era”.
It remains to be seen whether, as sometimes happens to him, the market has not been exaggerated.
Cited by CNBC, Morgan Stanley went to buy Tuesday on Monday.com, judging the fears linked to the “surss” AI. An observation shared by Brent Thill, of Jefferies who considered, in an interview with CNBC, that market worries were “exaggerated”. “Investors are not interested in a group but at an angle of attack,” he added, believing that the market shows “a misunderstanding in the way the software is built and maintained”.
Julien Marion – © 2025 BFM Bourse
