4 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Feb 26, 2026 04:01 PM IST Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has pushed back against investor fears that AI agents will cannibalise the enterprise software industry, stating that the markets have miscalculated the potentially existential threat facing software-as-a-service (SaaS) firms.
“I think the markets got it wrong. I think it’s very likely that these companies that we’re talking about are going to introduce agents that run on their platforms,” Huang said in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, February 25. The AI industry leader argued that software companies will use AI agents to develop software and boost efficiency.
“All of these tools that we use today, whether it’s Cadence, Synopsis, Service Now, or SAP, these tools exist for a fundamentally good reason, and these agentic AIs will be intelligent software that uses these tools on our behalf and help us be more productive,” he said.
Huang’s remarks come amid wider public discourse about a looming ‘SaaSpocalypse’ in reference to SaaS companies facing potential obsolescence due to AI disruption.
Earlier this month, Anthropic’s new suite of workplace automation tools sent shockwaves through global technology markets, including Indian IT stocks, with big names such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and HCL Technologies nosediving 4-7 per cent and the Nifty IT index plunging nearly 6 per cent, the biggest single-day fall since COVID-19. S&P 500 software and services index has lost nearly 23 per cent as of Wednesday’s market close as part of the selloff of software stocks.
While few analysts have warned that AI will “eat” software over the long term, several other stakeholders appear divided on the risks and the fundamentals behind the latest sell-off.
Acknowledging that the debut of Claude Cowork is an inflection point in AI, Huang said that AI agents will not replace but use the software tools developed by SaaS companies. “Why rewrite the browser when the browser exists? Why rewrite Excel when Excel exists, just use it,” he said. “Nobody’s going to service better than ServiceNow, and they’re going to come up with agents that are really fine-tuned and optimised for the work that uses the tools that they have […] In the end, we need the tools to finish their work and put the information back in a way that we can understand,” Huang added.Story continues below this ad
When asked whether he believes that AI agents will go beyond replacing tools and instead, replace the humans that built them, Huang replied, “They are going to help us […] We’re going to need lots and lots of software engineers but they won’t have to code like they used to code. They’ll code in a new way and work at a different level of abstraction.”
“I have 42,000 biological employees and I’m going to have hundreds of thousands of digital employees, and together we’re going to use a lot more tools,” he said.
Huang’s remarks came hours after the US-based chip behemoth reported better than projected 73 per cent revenue growth in the January-quarter earnings that ended their 2026 fiscal years. Over the full fiscal year, Nvidia had revenue of $216 billion and net profit of $120 billion, translating to a margin of 55.6 per cent. The company’s shares were up 2 per cent in extended trading after the quarterly earnings report, as per CNBC.