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When does a frenemy become a mortal threat? That question should be top of mind for executives atop enterprise software firms, such as ServiceNow, Salesforce and Snowflake, each of which at various times has announcedpartnerships with OpenAI. And yet OpenAI seems to be doing everything it can to put at least some of these firms out of business. As we reported on Friday night, in a presentation to investors last week, “OpenAI leaders said they expected the company’s future products and agents targeted at businesses to replace software from tech firms including Salesforce, Workday, Adobe, Slack and Atlassian.”
And on Monday, OpenAI announced the latest in a series of partnerships with consulting firms to help sell its Frontier AI agent management software to businesses. (For more on OpenAI’s enterprise plans, see here and here.) OpenAI is a master of marketing, to be sure, and a lot of its announcements are hype. Given its previously announced arrangements with some of these consulting firms, it’s unclear how incremental today’s announcement is. Meanwhile, the consulting firms will partner with anyone who’ll help them sell more of their services. They’ve already got AI-related partnerships with companies such as Snowflake, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google. McKinsey, in its announcement, said it works “with an array of leading technology providers…to bring clients the best innovation across all dimensions of AI.”
Though some of this stuff is overhyped, OpenAI’s efforts in this area undoubtedly pose a threat to enterprise software firms. And it’s not just the ChatGPT creator: Anthropic, which also has partnerships with Salesforce, ServiceNow and Snowflake, is taking similar steps to eat those companies’ lunches. The company behind Claude has scheduled an event on Tuesday to explain its plans for enterprise agents. That event may have been why the sell-off in software stocks resumed on Monday, although the overall market was down. But while the Nasdaq fell 1.2%, stocks such as Salesforce, Figma, ServiceNow and Snowflake were off between 3% and 9%.
Given that these stocks are down 30% or so this year, you wonder why executives from those firms don’t rethink any partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic. It surely doesn’t help software firms’ business dealings if uncertainty about their future hangs over everything. (This widely circulated report by Citrini Research outlined a particularly pessimistic take on the impact of AI on software.)
PayPal’s Suitors
Who might buy PayPal? Bloomberg on Monday reported that one of PayPal’s rivals was pondering a bid for the [insert synonym for beleaguered] payments pioneer. A takeover might be just the thing to turn PayPal around. As former PayPal executive David Marcus put it in a recent X post, “Over time, the company that had every advantage and could’ve become the most consequential and relevant payments company of our time, lost its mojo, its product edge, and its ability to compete in a market that’s being rewired and reinvented in front of our eyes.”
So now, with the stock down 85% in the past five years, shrinking PayPal’s market capitalization to about $41 billion, what company could step in and absorb the firm? Would such an acquisition make sense for Stripe, which handles payment processing for a huge number of businesses, particularly in the digital world? Probably not. While PayPal owns Stripe rival Braintree, the cultural gap between the fading payments pioneer and the more nimble, founder-led Stripe might be hard to overcome.
What about Jack Dorsey’s Block, which owns Cash App, a direct competitor to PayPal’s Venmo? Regulators might have a problem with the idea of the two companies combining. But seeing as Apple is trying to muscle into the payment app market, Block could argue it needs Cash App to survive. Whoever is the buyer, the future of PayPal is worth tracking.
In Other News
• Nvidia is planning to release a new chip in the first half of this year for consumer laptops and desktops in collaboration with Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek, The Wall Street Journal reported.
• Uber agreed to acquire SpotHero, an app that enables drivers to reserve parking spaces at garages based on location, for an undisclosed price. The acquisition could allow Uber to offer ride-hailing customers more services when they use their own cars and connect them to ride-hailing services after they park.
• The stablecoin launched by President Donald Trump’s family crypto company World Liberty Financial briefly lost its peg to the dollar on Monday, as the company said it faced a “coordinated attack” on its co-founders’ X accounts.
• Cerebras Systems has filed confidentially to go public, for the second time, The Information reported. The designer of AI chips and systems has been meeting with prospective investors before a potential listing that could take place as soon as this April, they said. Plans to go public last year were withdrawn.
• Anthropic accused Chinese model developers DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax of using data from Anthropic’s Claude models to train and improve their own AI.
• Shopify has started arranging for ads to promote its merchants to run in ChatGPT, the company told merchants, in an expansion of Shopify’s existing ad network.
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