At the application layer, moats are lagging, earned through scale & brand. At infrastructure, capital intensity demands a leading moat at founding.
Three weekend developments — the Fable retraction, Satya's ecosystem thesis & Salesforce's $3.6B Fin acquisition — reveal why the moat has shifted from models to harnesses.
If data gravity defined the last decade, agent gravity will define this one. As AI agents become the primary interface to enterprise data, the platforms that run them will capture an outsized share of value — & they're already locking the doors.
The new sales motion asks three questions : software budget, labor budget, & what ratio you want in three years.
Anthropic is executing Google's classic playbook : commoditize the complements to protect the castle. In 2026, that means destroying the revenue potential of SaaS categories to ensure the only line item is inference.
What happens when AI stops getting cheaper & starts getting more expensive? The implications for software companies are profound.
Intercom & Chroma shipped custom AI models today. Would you choose one software over another because it has a proprietary model with better performance?
AI skills are programs written in English that give agents capabilities instantly. Like Trinity downloading a pilot program, skills encode institutional knowledge in executable form.
Bezos's maxim applies in software, just not on price. Data from 69 public companies shows 76% gross margins but near-zero net income. Competition happens in S&M & R&D, not pricing.
Scott Fearon shorted 200+ companies from Silicon Valley. His six failure modes, from learning only from the recent past to falling victim to mania, are amplified by the AI shift.
