Tyler Crowe

AI spending is exploding, and meta, alphabet, all these companies are full steam ahead, and there doesn't seem to be as many issues as we thought about a year ago.

Will this anthropic moment for software have a similar result, or are there deeper concerns for these companies?

Yeah, I find myself landing in a very similar place, the mission-critical versus the relatively easy switching costs.

When I think of mission-critical, I think like banking software, Fitserv, Fidelity National, Jack Henry are the kind of companies that I don't really see getting affected by AI nearly as much as... I'm not going to name any names here, but like

working here at The Fool the past several years, we've swapped out productivity SaaS vendors two to three times, and life seems to have gone on with relatively not a whole lot of bumps in the road.

With that in mind, I mentioned Fitserv, Fidelity National, Jack Henry.

I want to put you two on the spot here.

I want you to highlight one stock in the software industry where you're not nearly worried about AI disruption.

Yeah, I think we got some really good ideas here.

And coming up after the break, we're going to talk about maybe some not great news as well.

We're going to talk about job productivity and current job numbers after the break.

Unfortunately, today is not the most positive news day for this podcast because we got some jobs numbers that were, to quote one of my favorite 1990s movies, Office Space, not great, Bob.

Job openings were the lowest since 2020 and announced layoffs were the highest since January of 2000.

Well, January layoff numbers were the highest since we saw in January of 2009.

Now, I don't know about you, but I'm struggling to put these numbers in perspective because thinking about the past five or six years of hiring and firing trends, we had some massive hiring rounds in 2021, 2022, just as we were coming out of COVID.

Even though some companies admitted they may have overshot their needs for labor, they were hesitant to lay off because of various reasons.

I'm struggling with this concept.

Is this just part of the natural ups and downs of the hiring cycle where we overshot early and now we're correcting?

Is this related to AI productivity that we were just talking about?

I'm really of many minds on this topic and I'd love to get your guys' input because I haven't come down on one side or the other.