Isabelle Bousquette

I don't know if we've seen that prove out yet.

it still seems like companies are investing a lot of money to use AI.

And it's been hard for them to point to a clear example of an actual financial return.

In a lot of ways, those financial returns are linked to the size of the workforce they have.

And so if they do layoffs and say, we're being a lot more efficient with AI, is that an example of a return?

So I do think over time there will be some right-sizing of the workforce based on the fact that companies now have all these AI capabilities, but that kind of seems like a longer-term horizon.

I do think revenue per employee is going up.

Companies are making more money on a per-employee basis than they have in the past, but companies

This is something that's just very hard to measure.

And so I think a lot of companies have given up on the phase of we made X percent return on the amount of money we spent on AI and have just accepted that this is a necessary technology for them to be using as a company.

And even if they can't prove it out with a specific number value, that doesn't make the investment all worth it.

The rise of these super capable AI agents is another thing that puts pressure on these traditional legacy SaaS companies, especially the coding agents, because that's where you saw a lot of the SaaSpocalypse fears stem from, which is with this great new coding agent, I don't need those expensive legacy providers.

The more nimble startups with

super cutting edge AI agents we see, the more pressure it does put on those companies.

From what I've seen, most of those companies are pretty aware of where things are headed and they've made huge investments themselves in agents.

If you take Salesforce as an example, they're making it

very front and center in terms of their strategy.

I think it's just a question of how fast can those companies move and how good are the agents they're building compared to the AI-native startups and the agents they're building.

Thanks again for having me.