This is Part II in a series examining the structural repricing of enterprise software. In Part I, I argue that SaaS incumbents are more resilient than the market assumes because they hold the context and workflow authority required by AI orchestration. In Part III, I examine who benefits from orchestration and why the answer is not what the market expects.
This second part lies between those and examines the same structural shift from the attackers’ perspective. What are the AI labs building, and what justifies a $380 billion valuation?
AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI are shifting focus from commoditizing models to orchestration platforms that coordinate agents, workflows, and enterprise context, justifying sky-high valuations like Anthropic’s $380B. OpenAI’s Frontier bets on a horizontal control plane for interchangeable agents, while Anthropic’s Cowork emphasizes vertical integration for deep embedding and switching costs. Success hinges on outpacin…