In this episode of AGNT, recorded at the New York Stock Exchange, Raphaelle d’Ornano, analyst and co-host of the AGNT podcast, joins theCUBE + NYSE Wired’s Gemma Allen to unpack how the rise of the inference economy is redrawing the competitive map for enterprise software.
She revisits her earlier bearish stance on Figma, noting that after falling nearly 71% from its IPO highs, the company’s Anthropic partnership represents a credible first-mover entry into the agentic orchestration layer.
D’Ornano challenges the traditional vertical-versus-horizontal SaaS defensibility playbook, proposing that the more meaningful distinction is between systems of record evolving into systems of action and tools that must find their place in the emerging orchestration graph.
The conversation also covers Salesforce’s record quarter, where Agentforce, combined with the Informatica acquisition, delivered 169% growth — evidence that the system-of-record-to-system-of-action transition can produce real numbers. She frames Slack as Salesforce’s most defensible agentic asset, citing “proximity to user intent” as a foundational principle of value in the agentic era.
On Nvidia, d’Ornano details the inference economy thesis: as enterprise workloads turn agentic, compute demand for inference will dwarf historical training spend, even as market nervousness lingers around circular financing dependencies tied to OpenAI. She remains bullish on AMD as a strong inference-era alternative, pointing to its Meta partnership and the supply-chain complexity of deploying Blackwell at scale. From Anthropic’s methodical product cadence — Claude Code to vertical plugins to security tooling — to the market’s tendency to confuse narrative with product reality, d’Ornano offers a framework for separating signal from panic.
00:00 - Intro
00:01 - Evolving Markets: Transformations in Media and Industry
03:58 - The SaaS-Pocalypse and the Role of Dev Tools
06:20 - Salesforce’s Journey through the Agentic World
11:01 - Nvidia’s Earnings & The Inference Economy
15:49 - Technological Rivalries: Navigating the GPU and AI Landscapes
23:22 - Conclusion and Looking Forward