--- title: "The Tipping Point Has Arrived! Goldman Sachs: AI Begins to Reshape SaaS Performance, Winners and Losers Emerge" type: "News" locale: "en" url: "https://longbridge.com/en/news/295380683.md" description: "Goldman Sachs warns: AI agents are reshaping the software industry landscape, and the tipping point for performance divergence has arrived! A surge in agent traffic is accelerating the harvest strategy for platform winners like Microsoft and Cloudflare; meanwhile, corporate budget reallocation and the ebbing of SEO are ruthlessly eroding the moats of traditional SaaS giants like Adobe. As old models are disrupted, AI is creating a batch of unexpected new kings and losers" datetime: "2026-08-10T09:21:32.000Z" locales: - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/news/295380683.md) - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/news/295380683.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/news/295380683.md) --- # The Tipping Point Has Arrived! Goldman Sachs: AI Begins to Reshape SaaS Performance, Winners and Losers Emerge The wave of AI agents is turning the structural divergence in the software industry from expectation into reality. In its latest research report, Goldman Sachs pointed out that **the second quarter of 2026 may become the turning point quarter where AI agent activity produces observable and quantifiable impacts on the fundamentals of software companies—and this round of divergence has already begun to leave clear traces in earnings data.** Goldman Sachs analysts Gabriela Borges and Callie Valenti provided clear long/short stances in the report: their view on SNOW and PANW has turned marginally positive; their view on ADBE, INTU, and WDAY has turned marginally negative; they remain bullish on MSFT, SHOP, NET, and TWLO, believing these companies are at the starting point of a multi-quarter fundamental inflection point. Meanwhile, the report noted for the first time that risks in application software are manifesting in performance in more substantive ways. In Goldman Sachs' view: **AI brings not only incremental opportunities but also simultaneously erodes the foundation of some traditional SaaS business models. Budget reallocation, elongated procurement cycles, and shifts in search traffic structure are creating a batch of unexpected losers, while platforms with architectural advantages are entering an accelerated harvest period.** ## Surge in Agent Traffic, Developer Platforms Benefit First Citing data from Cloudflare, Goldman Sachs pointed out that agent traffic currently accounts for more than 50% of all internet traffic, whereas this proportion was only 20% to 30% in 2025. The arrival of this threshold occurred approximately 18 months earlier than Cloudflare's initial prediction. This trend directly benefits developer platforms that can collaborate well with AI agents. Cloudflare added nearly 2 million new developers in the second quarter of 2026, compared to only 1.5 million for the entire year of 2025. Vercel's ARR accelerated again in the first half of 2026 following the inflection point in November 2025, with the latest disclosed value reaching $340 million by the end of February 2026. Twilio has achieved acceleration in growth for two consecutive quarters, with AI applications in voice scenarios continuing to scale up. Shopify's situation provides validation from another dimension. Goldman Sachs pointed out that Shopify's Catalog product allows long-tail brands to gain disproportionate exposure benefits in agent searches by setting parameters for product attributes that can be retrieved by agents. This trend began to emerge in the second half of 2025 and accelerated significantly in the second quarter of 2026. ## Fading SEO Dividends, Some Application Software Bear the Brunt The structural migration of search behavior—**evolving from traditional SEO to AI-driven AIEO (AI Engine Optimization)—is impacting software companies that heavily rely on search traffic for customer acquisition.** Goldman Sachs believes that HubSpot's pressure stems partly from this, with the company also disclosing an accelerated rate of downgrades in core products (including service tiers and seat counts). EverCommerce also pointed out that evolving search behavior created headwinds for some organic customer acquisition channels and specific product lines in the first half of 2026. Goldman Sachs holds a marginally negative stance on Adobe. The report believes that, on one hand, the evolution from SEO to AEO puts pressure on the top of its customer acquisition funnel; on the other hand, tools with built-in image generation capabilities like Gemini are intensifying competition. It remains unclear whether LLMs can replicate the conversion efficiency of Adobe's existing SEO funnel. The report also noted that Semrush is still executing its AEO strategic transformation, and the effectiveness of this transformation remains to be seen. ## SaaS Procurement Slows, Budget Reallocation Pressure Spreads A CIO survey released by Goldman Sachs in May 2026 showed that only 33% of corporate AI token budgets came from new allocations, while 66% came from the reallocation of existing budgets, with the two main source categories being labor budgets and application software budgets. This data provides budget-level evidence for the current pressure on application software. The report pointed out that enterprises are currently in an intensive experimental phase of tool trials, with many new tools layered on top of existing systems. This has led to elongated procurement decision cycles, and the market has formed a baseline expectation that tools should be available for free trial, implying that costs are borne by application software companies. The case of Figma Make is quite representative: the product began commercialization on March 13, 2026. Third-party data shows that MCP connections peaked on May 1 and had dropped by about 25% by June 1—as users transitioned from free usage to paying for credits, consumption behavior became markedly more rational. Goldman Sachs believes that the core businesses of INTU and WDAY will face pressure under the above logic. CRM (Salesforce), while not immune, is in the relatively best position among peers—its AELA enterprise license model (bundling AI features into enterprise licenses) is the most advanced, and its AI monetization path is the clearest. ## Consumption-Based Billing Models Reshape Forecasting Frameworks **Cloudflare's better-than-expected performance reveals another layer of structural change worth noting: customers adopting pooled plans (flexible credit consumption) accelerated their spending in the second quarter, directly driving performance significantly above expectations. Cloudflare's pooled revenue accounted for more than 20% of NNACV in the fourth quarter of 2025. This new billing model has expanded the standard deviation of performance, reducing the reference value of traditional guidance ranges.** According to Goldman Sachs, Cloudflare's response is to discount the midpoint of its guidance to reflect the new earnings distribution, rather than simply expanding the range. Goldman Sachs expects that as more consumption cohort data accumulates, the forecast accuracy of Cloudflare and similar vendors will gradually improve; meanwhile, the magnitude of earnings beats may be harder to predict, but the average level may be more substantial. This logic also applies to SNOW. Goldman Sachs pointed out that Snowflake's Cortex Code product is still in the early ramp-up phase, with discounts already factored into the guidance, leaving room for a potential beat in the earnings report in early September. The report also mentioned that part of Microsoft Azure's outperformance benefited from the introduction of floating pricing for GitHub Copilot on June 1—Goldman Sachs learned that some customers' GitHub bills grew by 100% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2026, with one software company valued at $3 billion seeing an increase of up to 200%. ## Security Sector Experiences Brief Volatility, High-Quality Targets Expected to Be Bought The security sector showed strong individual stock divergence this quarter. **Goldman Sachs believes that Check Point's poor performance mainly stemmed from older products and adjustments to its sales system; Fortinet's outperformance benefited from the unique cost-performance advantage of its firewall and converged networking products, as well as phased demand pull-forward before the announced price increase.** Looking at the medium to long term, since July, the industry's focus has concentrated on new security risks brought by breakthroughs in frontier models escaping sandboxes. The long-term beneficiaries of this trend are expected to be concentrated in the most technologically leading platforms—namely Palo Alto and CrowdStrike. Goldman Sachs is most bullish on PANW, citing reasons including: upside potential in firewall and Chronosphere businesses; CEO Nikesh Arora's significantly strengthened thought leadership layout on the X platform before the end of the fiscal year; and targeted acquisitions such as Portkey, Protect, and Koi aimed at AI risks. For CRWD, Goldman Sachs believes the fundamental inflection point is likely to arrive later in the year, with current valuation expectations being on the high side; OKTA has clearly stated that the product cycle for agent identity security is unlikely to start until 2027. 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