Hell week

Infrastructure vs. intelligence: The $400B reckoning

Author

Malcolm Frank, CEO
February 09, 2026

Hell week

This past week was "hell week" for enterprise software. Nearly $400 billion in market cap evaporated across five critical pillars:

  • The “SaaSocalypse”: Massive pullbacks hit HubSpot (-28%), Atlassian (-26%), ServiceNow (-24%), Salesforce (-22%), and Workday (-18%).

  • Cloud: Amazon off 12%, Microsoft 7%

  • Tech Services: Accenture, CapGemini, Infosys and Cognizant down an average of 9%

  • Data Services: S&P Global, FactSet, and Thomson Reuters shed an average of 17%

  • Research: Gartner plummeted 25%, Forrester 10% 

The trigger? The debut of Anthropic’s Claude Cowork agents. While these tools are nascent and still relatively complex to deploy, they triggered a violent re-evaluation of the sector. The market’s mental model shifted overnight from "AI augments enterprise software" to "AI replaces it."

The carnage was reminiscent of the March 2000 dot-com crash or the October 2008 financial crisis. Yet, the pain was remarkably localized; while SaaS bled, the S&P 500 remained flat.

So, is SaaS dead? No. Not at all. Companies like Salesforce, et. al. are still growing with healthy gross margins. They remain the backbone of corporate America, managing the workflows, best practices, security, and legal guardrails based on thousands of implementations. This infrastructure isn’t going anywhere. Just as the mainframe persisted as a high-performance anchor during the PC revolution, today’s SaaS giants will likely become the "super-servers" for the AI age. 

But for Wall Street? Investors suddenly no longer trust the future cash flows of today’s enterprise SW royalty.  

Dare I quote Lenin in today’s climate, who noted “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” We just lived through one of those weeks, and this is now a frontier model’s world; the rest of the stack is just living in it.

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