“I think it sent a clear signal to more conventional enterprises of what an AI-first company can achieve. And I think it sent a signal to the software companies, including SaaS companies, which have better economics per employee than traditional enterprises. But the number Anthropic has posted is just the next level up. That is going to call into question what companies like ServiceNow, Salesforce and Workday can do, and if you go further down, SAP. There is now a bar to cross.”
sputnikintelligence.com
The host had noted that revenue per employee in Anthropic's S-1 rose sharply over 12 months. The guest reads it as pressure on every software incumbent, not just a flattering metric.
…both to like and not like. And as you may already mention in your piece, Meta and Microsoft that were big users are starting to pull back now on the use of cloud. So that could also be a concern going forward. But again, the numbers they posted in terms of customer counts, extremely impressive.
…on my list is that the revenue per employee also has grown quite well, right? So over the last 12 months, that went from 1.4 million per employee to 6.6 million, which as you just mentioned, I guess the more forward deployed engineers they have, might that number slow down or even decrease, right?
Actually, what I thought this number was impressive on is, first of all, I think it sent a clear signal to more conventional enterprises of what an AI-first company can achieve, right? So that's a big, big point there. The second one, I think it sent a signal to the software companies, including SaaS companies, which definitely do not have, I mean, they have better economics per employee than traditional enterprises. But that kind of number that Anthropic has posted is just the next level up. So that is going to call into question what companies like ServiceNow and Salesforce and Workday and the like can do. And also, obviously, if you go further down to more traditional software companies, SAP, and that will have an impact on, they'll have to rethink in terms of how they improve their numbers, because now there is a bar to cross.
And so before I go to the things I don't like, are there things you like that are not on my list?
No, actually, I think that it was, I think to me, it's interesting how the software development has pulled the business along. It tells you where we can, again, what we can do with AI and the right AI. We'll see how it translates to other tasks. But again, so far, so good. I mean, everything has…
So I guess there's one other thing on my list that I like, which is a bit of a mixed bag. So I'm just going to mention it here before we take it. Down later in my list of negatives. But basically, I guess that, you know, for a long time, my impression is that a lot of the revenue comes from API…