OpenAI's Presence rattles SaaS stocks. Workday, Atlassian, HubSpot, Salesforce fall 7-13%. TD Cowen says product directly competes with SaaS offerings.
OpenAI's new product Presence sent software stocks lower over Wednesday and Thursday, with some companies losing more than 12%.
The tool lets companies set guardrails and permissions around how AI agents use corporate data. It is designed to automate tasks in customer support, sales, and internal processes. The release puts OpenAI in direct competition with established SaaS vendors whose shares have been under pressure from the risk that AI will replace their software.
Workday dropped 9.9%. Atlassian fell 11.8%. HubSpot lost 12.7%. Salesforce slid 7.7%. Okta declined 4.2% over the two sessions. The moves extended a rough period for technology stocks. Oil prices surged. Bond yields moved higher. Big Tech earnings disappointed investors.
In a note to clients, TD Cowen analysts said the Presence announcement was a "major reason" for a 3% sell-off in the IGV software index on Wednesday and further declines on Thursday.
"Presence is being marketed with much of the AI Agent capabilities that SaaS vendors pitch, including packaging LLM reasoning + data access + governance/policy control," the analysts wrote.
Derrick Wood, a tech analyst at TD Cowen, told Business Insider that customer service and sales applications are among the most exposed.
Wood pointed to a similar event in early October, when OpenAI blog posts showcasing internal AI tools sent shares of HubSpot, DocuSign, and ZoomInfo lower. At the time, TD Cowen called the reaction overblown but noted that "days like this remind investors of how much concern there is in the market around 'AI eating software'."
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
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