Jason Lemkin says AI agents are reshaping software development. An AI sales rep closed a $70K deal without sleeping, but Lemkin warns AI should never touch production code. Top developers will stay in high demand, equipped with expensive AI tools costing up to $10K monthly.
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like our agents don't sleep, Harry. This is the thing I didn't get until I ran like 4 different AIs for SaaStr. Our AI SDR brings in, we were DMing yesterday, right? Our AI SDR brought in a deal, you know, like a $70K deal and it doesn't sleep. And if you're an engineer or developer, your AI isn't gonna sleep anymore. Now you don't want it touching production code, okay? I have learned that lesson, okay? But if it's debugging or working on complex issues or building out an algorithm or, or doing refactoring part of your code base, you will, you can consume, it can work for you 24 hours a day, right? So, and we will use all of the to— there may be an end limit, right? Just, and so maybe this investment will peter out, but I don't see it today, right? I think, good God, we're gonna be coding 20, we're all gonna be coding 24/7 with our agents. Everyone's saying that like, it's so hard to get a job in software today. If you look at the Wall Street Journal, it, it's not remotely true. If you have the skill set today, if you're super smart in math or CS or physics and you're in any school today, like my son's a freshman and he's off the charts in math. He already has offers, okay? And he's not even looking. Okay. So we have this, you know, this is what we know, but I can see it in the real world. If you're a top-tier developer, like you just want to arm them up with every tool you possibly can because no one wants the folks that went to DeVry programming school like they wanted in 2021. That market is dead, right? So we're going to arm them up with $10K a month. Listening to everything that you say then, Jason, Anthropic is at least a $2 trillion company, maybe, right? I mean, uh, that, you know, it's just, there's just so much investment here right now. Are there issues if, you know, if, um, you know, I mean, I mean, obviously OpenAI is coming very hard at them right now, right?
Um, I'm not signed up for $2 trillion, but I have, you know, and I don't have to be to say that, you know, this is going to be an extraordinarily valuable company. I, I, I don't there's only 4 or 5 companies that are worth more than a trillion. And it's worth pointing out that only one of them is really selling just kind of— NVIDIA, obviously, which is pretty much a monopoly selling 100% market share in the most valuable commodity you have. All the others touch every human being on the planet who has IT, Apple, Google, Facebook. And Microsoft. So I don't think you— for a record, just to say it— I don't think you get to it more than a trillion dollars if you're just selling stuff to developers and infants, which isn't to say I don't think you do extraordinarily well.
If Anthropic ends the year at, what, $7 billion in revenue?
