Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff appears at the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington on November 19, 2025.
Stefani Reynolds | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Box CEO Aaron Levie says that in his cloud software provider’s 20-year history, “this is the most exciting time we’ve ever experienced.” Wall Street doesn’t see it that way.
The stock is down 17% in 2026 after starting the year with its biggest monthly decline since 2023. It has found itself caught in a software swoon, as investors dump shares of companies they fear will be displaced by the rise of artificial intelligence agents.
THE WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund has fallen about 20% so far in 2026, including a 6.5% drop this week. A number of companies are faring much worse than Box. HubSpot fell 39% this year after a 42% decline in 2025. Figma plunged 40% this year, Atlassian is down 35%, and Shopify fell 29%.
The generative AI boom, started by OpenAI’s ChatGPT just over three years ago, has quickly spread across the business realm, with new tools capable of creating apps, websites and other digital products in seconds or minutes with just a few text prompts. Levie describes the “cognitive dissonance” occurring within the industry, as companies see the power of new technology to improve their products, while considering the broader external fear that AI will destroy them.
“It somewhat misunderstands this idea that companies tend to spend their resources and their time and their energy,” Levie told CNBC’s “The Exchange” on Wednesday.
He argued that businesses would much rather pay for the products and services of a provider specializing in back-office software or customer relationship management systems than do it themselves and take on all the responsibilities that come with it.
Sales force CEO Marc Benioff made a similar argument, telling CNBC’s Jim Cramer in December that “we have all the customer data” and that Agentforce, which automates sales and customer service workflows, is “the fastest-growing product I’ve ever seen in the history of Salesforce.”
Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNowsaid last week, after his company reported healthy quarterly results and forecasts, that market concerns are misplaced, and that its products serve as “the semantic layer that makes AI omnipresent in the enterprise.”
Dan Springer, former CEO of DocuSign who now runs legal software startup Ironclad, said ServiceNow’s offerings can’t be replaced by AI, at least not yet.
“I haven’t seen anything built that could attack this franchise,” Springer said.
Yet both Salesforce and ServiceNow have lost about a quarter of their value this year.
Progress at Anthropic, creator of the Claude AI model, has been a big catalyst for accelerated sales. Friday, Anthropic announcement new legal, financial and product marketing capabilities for its productivity tool Claude Cowork, and released the plugins under an open source license, allowing customization.
Claude takes on OpenAI’s GPT models and Google Gemini, but with a focus on selling subscriptions to large enterprises looking to deploy AI at scale.
“I’m impressed with this technology,” Celso Pinto, senior product director at software company The Access Group, said Monday. Message. He said he used Cowork and software development product Claude Code to review marketing copy, resolve technical issues and produce legal documents.
Buying opportunity?Public and private markets have decided that infrastructure companies and developers of cutting-edge models are the winners from AI, while software companies are likely the losers, no matter how strong their businesses are today.
Earlier this month, Anthropic signed a term sheet for a $10 billion funding round at a valuation of $350 billion. OpenAI reportedly eyes a valuation of more than $800 billion, and Google’s parent company Alphabet has seen its shares rise more than 60% over the past year, bringing its market capitalization to $4 trillion.
Software executives aren’t the only ones trying to counter the dominant narrative. A number of technology investors and analysts have said that, on the ground, they don’t see IT buyers shedding their software solutions. Stifel analysts wrote in a report last month on HubSpot that the CRM company’s business is doing well.
Monday.com celebrates its IPO on Nasdaq on June 10, 2021.
Source: Nasdaq
“Despite broader fears of AI-related disruption, no partners have discussed near-term headcount reductions or AI-related headquarters disruptions,” wrote the analysts, who recommend buying the stock.
Cantor analysts cover monday.com wrote in a note this week that the project management software provider is a “profitable producer benefiting from secular growth trends in digital and AI collaboration.” They have a buy rating on the stock and see the 29% decline this year as creating an “attractive setup.”
Byron Deeter, a longtime cloud software investor at Bessemer Venture Partners, takes a buy-the-dip approach.
“Chaos creates opportunity!” Deeter wrote in a post on Wednesday. “A lot of money is about to be made for those with the conviction to place the right bets on private and public software now.”
Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, speaks at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on October 29, 2025.
Kimberly White | TechCrunch | Getty Images
At Box, where Deeter was an early investor, the company’s 41-year-old co-founder and CEO says that even if investors’ fears are overblown, software providers must quickly adopt AI to stay relevant.
“AI requires all software companies to be on their toes,” Levie said. “It certainly puts the onus on every incumbent to make sure they’re doing more for their customers. I think it’s an incredible thing for the market and for IT buyers.”
— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.
WATCH: The software sector loses around 30% of its value in three months. Here’s what’s behind the sale