Jason M. Lemkin says AI budgets and board pressure are forcing companies to buy new vendors right now, breaking the typical 5-6 year buying cycle. He compares this to the late 1990s web boom and the 2020 cloud migration, when external forces made adoption almost overnight. The window is open. Move fast.
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But at the same time, what is different from the old days, not only are leaders emerging, but we've never seen so many folks looking for new vendors. They're either looking for new vendors because they have AI budget. They're looking for vendors because they're under pressure from their boss to show AI innovation. And in many cases, it's the only incremental budget. No one is putting more budget into their old SaaS software. It's all going into AI. And so everyone's in market. It used to be— I don't know what you learned as a marketer at Salesforce, but traditionally you'd hoped a prospect would be in market every 5 to 6 years, right, for a big buy, right? Because it would take like a year to get it going, the second year to scale up, the third year to get frustrated, and the fourth or fifth— fourth year to start looking at a new solution.
You got it. And a fifth year, right?
Now everything's in market again. This has never happened in— maybe when the web started, right? But everything's in market. It's in total flux. it means a lot of things for different players. But if you're a buyer, just get going.
It's the right peril, right? In 1999, 2000, like, everything was in flux. And nobody knew, is PeopleSoft going to lead me to the future of HR? You know, is Siebel going to lead me to the future of CRM? And it's kind of like that same thing right now. Like, who's going to lead me to the future of, in our case, go-to-market, but in all these other markets?
But even there, you know, as cloud got bigger, you know, the only time I think in our lifetimes we saw intense pressure to go to the cloud was 2020. Okay? And that was an exogenous situation where people— I literally saw it in investments I made. We saw it in eSignatures, but I saw it in companies I invested in, like Talkdesk for cloud contact center. Like, you could wait 20 years to decide if you really wanted your contact center to go to the cloud. And then in March 2020, these businesses went 10x, like, because I have no choice, right? But that was the only time when people felt like they had to go to the cloud instantly. But now, yes, it is a small subset of tech and innovation, but there's so much money in I need to go AI today.
Right?
Right. And you got to be part of that if you want to win.
For most companies, it's coming tops down from their board. It's like the board to the CEO to everybody else. Move, move, move. And so, of course, that's where the incremental budget is coming from.
