Laura Bratton

Atlassian and other software firms are promoting knowledge graphs, or graph databases, to help AI agents analyze relationships between organizational data. These tools differ from traditional column-and-row databases like those from Databricks and Snowflake by requiring less AI processing power, potentially reducing costs. The shift reflects how software companies are positioning themselves to profit from storing and managing the data that AI systems need to operate.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has reduced its Salesforce footprint by letting a contract expire and shifting correspondence management to C3 AI's software, deployed through reseller Carahsoft. The move, led by new CIO Sam Berry, replaced a $6 million annual Salesforce contract with a $9 million one-year C3 contract that used AI to clear a backlog of roughly 2,000 unanswered letters in two months. The shift reflects broader cost optimization efforts within the Trump administration's DOGE initiative.

Coinbase, Shopify, and Ramp have built proprietary AI coding agents for internal use to reduce reliance on expensive third-party solutions from Anthropic and OpenAI. Coinbase's tool, called Forge, launched to all engineers in April 2026 and is accessible via Slack, GitHub, and a web interface. The move reflects a broader trend among well-resourced tech firms to develop custom alternatives rather than pay for commercial coding AI services.

Anthropic's Claude Code has maintained market dominance in AI coding tools despite rising competition from OpenAI's Codex, open-source models, and cost pressures from the company's shift to usage-based pricing. Companies that migrated to Claude Code between late 2025 and early 2026 have largely remained with the product even as costs have surged, eroding positions held by Microsoft's GitHub Copilot and Cursor. The persistence of Claude Code's lead suggests switching costs and product satisfaction outweigh pricing concerns for many enterprises.

Model routers, which automatically select the most cost-effective AI model for a given task rather than defaulting to expensive cutting-edge options, are gaining adoption among enterprises seeking to reduce AI spending. Companies like Snowflake and Palo Alto Networks have reported cost savings by routing basic tasks such as email summarization and document search to cheaper open source or older proprietary models. The routers take multiple forms, from standalone products to cloud provider features to internal IT-built applications, all aimed at maintaining quality while lowering costs as organizations grapple with rising AI model prices and employee overuse of premium models.

OpenAI and Anthropic have each hired dozens of Salesforce employees since the start of 2026, with more than 45 joining Anthropic and close to 40 joining OpenAI, primarily for sales and marketing roles. The hiring reflects both companies' efforts to build out enterprise sales teams as they compete for corporate customers. Salesforce's deep bench of enterprise software talent has become a key recruitment source for the AI companies.

Andy Konwinski, billionaire co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity AI, is advocating for AI researchers to remain in academia and publish openly rather than joining Big Tech companies. His pitch comes as frontier AI firms including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have reduced public disclosure of training details, model architecture, and computational resources. Konwinski argues that open research is essential for democratic and societal reasons, citing a 2017 Google paper that became foundational to today's most popular AI models.

Colin Fleming, ServiceNow's Chief Marketing Officer, is departing the IT services software company to join OpenAI as CMO of its business segment. Fleming spent two years at ServiceNow and previously held marketing roles at Salesforce. The move reflects OpenAI's continued investment in business-focused leadership as it expands commercial operations.

Workday's stock surged more than 10% in after-hours trading after the company reported that customer adoption of its AI agents roughly doubled quarter-over-quarter to exceed 4,000 users in the three months ended April 30. The HR software maker's disclosure signals accelerating enterprise demand for AI-powered automation in workforce management. The stock reaction reflects investor confidence in Workday's ability to monetize AI capabilities within its existing customer base.

Businesses are redirecting software budgets toward AI providers like Anthropic as costs mount, and they're using this shift as leverage to renegotiate terms with traditional enterprise software vendors. Rather than canceling existing contracts outright, companies are demanding shorter contract lengths and more favorable terms from SaaS providers, positioning themselves to reduce reliance on legacy applications if AI makes them less critical. This reflects a broader reallocation of IT spending driven by rising AI costs and uncertainty about the future role of conventional software.

ServiceNow announced Action Fabric, a new usage-metering layer that will charge customers for AI agents accessing data within ServiceNow applications. The company joins HubSpot and Workday in implementing what amounts to a tollgate on external AI agent usage. COO Amit Zavery said ServiceNow will meter and charge for this access, effectively taxing customers who use third-party AI agents to interact with their data. The move reflects a broader trend of enterprise software vendors monetizing AI agent interactions, though it raises questions about whether such tollgates will help or hurt long-term competitiveness.

Palantir reports earnings this week amid investor concerns that generative AI tools from Anthropic and OpenAI will cannibalize demand for enterprise data software. The company's stock has fallen nearly 20% year-to-date, underperforming the Nasdaq by a wide margin, as investors lump it with other software names like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and HubSpot that face similar displacement fears. This earnings report will test whether Palantir can demonstrate pricing power and AI-driven growth strong enough to reverse the sector's valuation pressure.

SAP, the $200 billion German enterprise software giant, published a policy last month that would ban customers from using unauthorized external AI agents to access data stored in SAP applications. The policy does not name specific targets but could apply to AI agents from competitors like Salesforce and ServiceNow, as well as third-party tools such as OpenClaw. This move reflects growing concern among enterprise software vendors about customers deploying AI agents to extract and manipulate sensitive business data without vendor oversight or control.

Microsoft's GitHub announced Monday that it will layer consumption-based fees on top of existing Copilot subscription costs, charging customers based on actual AI tool usage. The shift reflects a broader industry move away from flat seat-based pricing toward variable consumption models for AI services. The change affects GitHub Copilot users across individual developers and enterprise teams, introducing a new cost structure that ties spending directly to usage patterns rather than fixed per-seat arrangements.

Adobe is adopting outcome-based pricing for its newly rebranded CX Enterprise suite of AI products, charging customers only when AI agents successfully complete tasks rather than using flat subscription or usage-based models. The move follows similar strategies by Sierra and aligns with a broader industry shift toward performance-tied pricing, as companies like Anthropic, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday have already moved to usage-based models. CX Enterprise includes AI agents that can integrate data from Adobe and non-Adobe sources, such as AWS databases, to solve business problems like identifying why a hotel chain is experiencing low bookings in specific regions.

Salesforce has released a hosted Model Context Protocol server that allows customers to connect third-party AI agents directly to their Salesforce data. The tool enables external AI systems to access and interact with customer information stored in Salesforce without requiring direct API integrations. This move positions Salesforce to capture revenue from customers who prefer using non-Salesforce AI agents while keeping their data within the Salesforce ecosystem.

Enterprise software stocks including ServiceNow and Snowflake fell sharply on Friday amid investor concerns that new AI tools will disrupt legacy software vendors. However, the market sell-off may be overly broad. Atlassian and Figma stand out as exceptions, distinguished by their notably high R&D spending as a percentage of revenue, suggesting they are investing heavily in new product development to compete in an AI-driven landscape.