Martin Casado

So it is very hard to differentiate whether the users are accessing the APIs in the same way that they always have been or whether they are accessing them in agentic ways that may substitute for human workflows.

Maybe they're not.

This may all be kind of much ado about nothing.

I think it's foolish for them to close down their APIs.

So you're putting me in a weird position.

I'm trying to defend a position that I think is stupid.

So I think a lot of these threats are not new.

Like, well, maybe they'll use programmatic access and thereby use less seats.

Maybe they'll move some functionality to their own interfaces.

I mean, that is a real thing that has been happening for years.

I completely agree.

And I will point out another piece of evidence for that claim, which is if you look at the budgets of real companies that are heavy consumers of software, they spend five to 10% of headcount on software.

Software costs are huge.

immaterial in the grand scheme of things.

Software compared to everything else a typical business spends money on is so cheap.

The idea that they're going to use AI to value engineer the number of seats they have on Slack or something is ridiculous.

They're going to use AI to go make their business work better in whatever it is that they do.

That they're actually good.

They're not trying to take that 5% software spend and turn it into four and a half.

That is not the highest, best use of AI.