Goldman Sachs: Software Stocks Begin to Cash In on AI Dividend

August 12th. Goldman Sachs TMT transaction expert Peter Callahan pointed out that after this round of earnings season, a shift is taking place in the AI narrative within the software sector. Previously, the market was more concerned about how generative AI would weaken the moat of traditional software companies. However, the data infrastructure and development tools sector has begun to transition from an "AI headwind" to an "AI tailwind." Companies such as Cloudflare, Palantir, Datadog, Twilio, and Atlassian are receiving more attention. In contrast, whether traditional SaaS application companies can establish an equally clear AI benefit logic remains to be seen.

The underlying change is that the commercialization of AI is shifting from model training to inference, agents, and automation applications. Cloudflare disclosed that non-human traffic has surpassed human traffic and is expected to continue to grow rapidly if the current trend persists. This means that AI may not necessarily just be a substitute for software companies. For platforms that handle data, APIs, network traffic, security, and development tools, the increase in agent numbers and call frequency itself could become a new source of demand.

Therefore, the software industry is experiencing significant differentiation: whether AI is a bullish factor is increasingly dependent on whether a company is at the application layer or infrastructure layer, and whether it can directly monetize AI traffic growth. (Golden Finance)