Salesforce and Snowflake Earnings to Focus Attention on AI’s Software Impact

As we return from the long weekend, we’re preparing for a resumption this week of one of tech’s big debates: whether AI is killing enterprise software. Salesforce, Snowflake and Asana are each reporting earnings for the first fiscal quarter in the next few days, providing us with an update on how they’re doing in selling their own AI tools—and whether AI startups are taking any business from them.

Here’s a prediction: Executives from each will gush about how AI is transforming their businesses in a good way, regardless of what the numbers show. That’s what Workday co-founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri did last Thursday, when the long-established seller of human resources software reported earnings. He declared: “With AI, we are essentially a startup again.” Bhusri didn’t mean Workday’s revenue has shrunk to that of a newly launched firm, of course. Instead, it is moving quickly to offer AI-powered services to its customers. In the quarter, that helped sharply lift the pace of new contracts it signed, the company reported.