Czy AI zniszczy branżę oprogramowania?

In this episode of Motley Fool Money, Motley Fool contributors Matt Frankel, Tyler Crowe, and Jon Quast discuss:

• Why software stocks are down amid AI concerns.
• The SaaS companies likely to be the most vulnerable.
• The software stocks that could win in an agentic AI world.

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A full transcript is below.

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This podcast was recorded on April 9, 2026.

Tyler Crowe: Making sense of the situation in SaaS stocks. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Tyler Crowe, and today I'm joined by longtime Fool contributors Matt Frankel and Jon Quast. A few of us are going to be at a Motley Fool member event, and we'll be a little bit of traveling. We're pre-recording this episode, but we're going to do a special episode where we're going to answer a listener question that we realized we couldn't do in a single segment, and we wanted to do a whole show about it. It's, of course, about SaaS companies or software as a service.

We got a question a couple of days ago from Scott Pounders, one of our listeners, and he asks, ''I own quite a few SaaS companies in my portfolio. SaaS, meaning software as a service, that have been hit hard due to the AI revolution. Some have seen obvious that they can survive with AI. Could we do an episode in which popular SaaS companies are most vulnerable to this AI? I'm looking at particular companies, HubSpot and Constellation Software. Before we get too deep, I want to set the stage here of SaaS companies, why Scott is so anxious about this particular topic. I don't want to assume everyone listening knows exactly what's going on with SaaS companies and the disruption that we're seeing with AI. Jon, how about you set the stage here for what Scott is asking for everyone else?

Jon Quast: Absolutely. I want to speak to that, Tyler. First, I do want to speak to SaaS companies in general and why investors have really loved these stocks historically. I think there are two reasons why these have been well-loved, and they're just really good businesses. The first way that we see that is these companies offer a software product suite, and so this means that usually these companies have high profit margins. If it can get a customer, it can then start selling these bolt-on software products with very little incremental effort. That just boosts the revenue, much of it drops straight to the bottom line, very attractive financials, generally speaking, in the SaaS industry.

The second thing is that these companies usually have a recurring revenue model. Once you get a customer, they buy from you basically every month, and that's very different than say, a Whirlpool. Whirlpool might sell you a washing machine, and you might love that washing machine, but you're not going to buy another washing machine next month. It's going to be a long time. Whirlpool is doing a one-time sale and done a business. A SaaS business it's a recurring revenue model. That's a great thing to have high-margin, recurring revenue. Here's the problem, they could be disrupted by artificial intelligence. A couple of skilled AI prompters can create software products that do what some of these SaaS companies do, and they can do it in just a matter of days. Investors are understandably scared about this, and we can look at this sentiment with ETF, an exchange-traded fund called the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF, ticker symbol IGV. This ETF owns a lot of SaaS stocks. Over the last six months, it's dropped over 30%, whereas the NASDAQ is only down about 9%. That shows us directionally investors are running away from SaaS companies.

Tyler Crowe: As we look about this, as you said, it's starting to show up in companies, like you said, in this ETF. For a lot of the part, it's happening mostly on valuation. We haven't really seen a whole lot of, I would say, tangible evidence of it across the entire SaaS universe. But there are some isolated examples, and Matt, maybe you could walk through maybe some of the core examples of companies that actually have been disrupted by AI so far.

Matt Frankel: Well, the online homework help and tutoring platform Chegg is probably the most extreme example of this so far. The stock is down by 99%, not even misspeaking, down by more than 99% since peaking in 2021. Essentially, free AI tools that are available, like ChatGPT, have literally replaced its core product. Even Google, since it shows AI and writing search results, it's done that. Revenue is falling by 40% year over year right now. Traffic from its users is dropping even faster, but with most of the stocks that we're covering, including the two that were mentioned by the listener, that have been beaten down. Nothing has really happened yet except investor fears. It's estimated that more than $2 trillion in market cap has been wiped out by SaaS businesses in the first quarter of 2026 alone, but some of the most vulnerable businesses that we'll get into in a minute are still seeing revenue climb and more businesses adopt their platforms. For example, ServiceNow stock has dropped over 50% over the past year despite growing subscription revenue by more than 20%. Datadog is down nearly 40% from a tie, and bookings surged by 37% year over year in the latest quarter. Adobe is another one that's trading for roughly one-third of its historic price-earnings valuation. Now, I'm not saying that these companies aren't going to be impacted by AI, but in a lot of cases so far, there's a disconnect between the stock performance and the actual business results we're seeing from the company.

Tyler Crowe: Let me go in a little bit of a scenario planning situation for investors, and I'll direct this back to you, Matt. Spelling out the best-case, worst-case scenario here, as you're looking at the space, what are the doom and gloom scenarios for SaaS companies, and what is the Pollyanna? Hey, this is probably good for us, situation.

Matt Frankel: The worst-case scenario, simply put, is that AI renders a lot of these SaaS businesses essentially worthless or at least a lot less useful than they are right now. Like I mentioned a minute ago, we're already seeing signs of disruption in a few popular SaaS businesses, but not many. But, for example, it would be terrible for companies like Atlassian if AI just allowed businesses to simply code their own workflow automation. But it's important to note that even in a worst-case, most SaaS businesses, they wouldn't go to zero. It's just some of their highest-paying customers could either take a DIY approach, or need fewer seats, or something like that. The best-case scenario would be that AI ends up being a lot more of an advantage than a threat to these SaaS businesses. Several industry experts, including Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, recently said that the market got it wrong on SaaS. He says he believes that AI agents won't replace enterprise software, but the agents themselves will use the tools, specifically called out ServiceNow, Cadence, Synopsis. But his logic could apply to most of the SaaS companies we're talking about, not Chegg, obviously.

Tyler Crowe: Unfortunately, I think Chegg might end up being the punching bag that we talk about the most today when it comes to this topic. After the break, we're going to talk about some of the ones that we don't think are in much trouble. We'll also get into some of the ones that we really think are in trouble. But before we do, I really want to make sure that we get Scott's question answered here, because he was specifically asking about HubSpot and Constellation. Jon, running the gamut of SaaS companies today, where do you see HubSpot and Constellation landing on that spectrum of, hey, it'll be okay, versus these companies are absolutely doomed?

Jon Quast: The truthful answer is, I don't know. You look at a business like HubSpot, you look at something like Constellation software. HubSpot, this is the customer retention management platform, marketing, sales, all that stuff. You can make a very good case that AI can do this well, and the same thing with Constellation. It owns so many different software products that it's logical that at least some of them can be replicated with good AI coding. I understand the fears when it comes to those two businesses, and I would understand if an investor would take an outside look and be, I'm a little bit nervous here.

Again, though, I will circle back to something that Matt did say. There's a case where Chegg is already seeing the disruption, but there are many businesses, and these two are included, where it's fear, but AI is not eating the lunch yet. Both of these companies, when you look at their trailing 12-month revenue, both are at all-time highs. You look at free cash flow, both of these companies are at all-time highs. The only thing that has changed so far for Constellation and HubSpot is the valuation. Right now, Constellation trades at three times sales. It hasn't been this cheap since the Great Financial Crisis. HubSpot wasn't around back at the Great Financial Crisis. It actually trades at its lowest valuation ever since going public at four times sales. It has had a huge reversal in the valuation. Remember what I said at the outset. These are great businesses, great margins. They enjoyed very high elevated valuations, and now investors are like, there's no future here, and so they've gone completely the opposite direction.

Maybe the pendulum has swung. If investors are right, right now, investors are saying that Constellation and HubSpot don't have a future. If investors are right, then we will see that show up in the financials, and it's only a matter of time. But if investors are wrong here, these two SaaS companies, if they can thrive in the age of AI, then this is a fantastic contrarian opportunity here. But it really depends on how you see it, specifically for these two. I don't know personally, so I would stay on the sidelines personally.

Tyler Crowe: Even though SaaS is a unique business model, there is obviously a very wide gamut of possibilities of companies that are using this particular business model to do what they do. After the break, we're going to dig into some of the companies that are on our radar as potential victims of disruption.

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Tyler Crowe: As I was saying before the break, there is a lot of options when it comes to SaaS. It isn't necessarily a type of business. It's a way that a lot of software companies have modeled their businesses today. But as we're looking at potential companies, parts of the SaaS universe that are going to be disrupted by AI, I wanted to toss the question to both of you. As you're looking at the AI revolution, maybe it's not just that AI can displace what they do, but maybe it's also the businesses to which they're selling could be radically different, and that could result in big problems for these particular companies. As you're looking at the entire SaaS universe right now, I'm going to start with you, Jon. What is one company that you're really looking at closely as a potential victim of the AI disruption?

Jon Quast: I'm worried about Asana, ticker symbol ASAN. Generally speaking, workplace, or enterprise productivity, or workflow software. I never really found that whole genre personally very useful, and I think it's even more in danger now. It seems like AI really is coming in here and providing a lot of tools, and making a lot of this software less useful or perhaps more obsolete. Look, Asana, when it comes to this space in general, if we zoom out, Asana is one of the smaller companies that's smaller than many of its competitors. Even though competitors are bigger, they have superior growth rates. That's already a problem.

You look at Asana's net retention rates, they've already dropped below 100%. This basically means its existing customer base is spending less money now than it was last year. The company has a pay-per-seat business model, and if you think about this big picture, let's say that AI comes in and makes companies more efficient. They need less tech workers because existing tech workers are using AI tools and they're becoming more effective at what they do. That turns into fewer seats needing Asana's technology, and Asana is a pay-per-seat platform. Just thinking about how AI could disrupt it even there, just by making its customers more efficient, those customers would have fewer seats than to buy from Asana. I think that's what we're already seeing playing out in the numbers for Asana. It seems like it's a declining opportunity. It already seems like it's one of the weaker players. Considering all these things, it does seem to paint a bleak outlook for Asana and its shareholders.

Matt Frankel: I went in a very similar direction, and it's a company whose products I've actually used three times so far today. It's a company that I enjoy their products. I find them very useful, but I have to call it Atlassian here, the ticker symbol is TEAM. If you're not familiar, this is the company that provides the Jira Workflow platform. They have other tools like Confluence, both of which I use regularly. In this case, it's not necessarily that the product itself will be replaced by AI, Jon alluded to this. It potentially could, but that's not the primary concern. The primary concern is that pricing model. Jon mentioned the pay per seat model, and it's not just employees are going to become more efficient. You're going to need fewer employees. That's absolutely the case.

But like Jensen Huang said, with AI