Jason M. Lemkin says AI is forcing a buying cycle unlike anything before. Companies are reallocating budget away from existing SaaS to chase AI, and leadership pressure means everything's in market right now. He compares it to the cloud acceleration in 2020 that boosted Talkdesk.
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 it's for. It's in many cases, it's the only, 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 five to six 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 year to start looking at a new solution. And a fifth year, right now, everything's in market again. This has never happened. 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.
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. Investments I made, we saw it in new signatures, but I saw it in companies I invested in. Like Talk Desk 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 20, 2020, these businesses went 10x because I have no choice, right? But that was the only time when people felt, 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 and I need to go AI today, right? And you gotta be part of that if you wanna 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.
