What is Anthropic Cloud Cowork, which has hit the shares of Infosys, TCS and other SaaS companies?
Infosys, TCS and other SaaS companies similarly lost hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. Reason? It was AI.
In the early hours of Wednesday, probably when most of you were fast asleep, Infosys, TCS and other SaaS companies lost hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. The accident was so severe that analysts called it the “SaaS-pocalypse”. The reason? Anthropic released a bunch of new plugins for cloud cowork that almost immediately sparked fears that SaaS was dead, or on the verge of dying.
Before we go any further, it’s important to emphasize: SaaS, short for software as a service, is not dead. Not yet anyway. Whether it’s dying or not remains a matter of debate, although you should know that luck and consensus are not on its side. From Microsoft’s Satya Nadella to Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu, everyone working in tech at scale is saying that this is the time for SaaS to evolve and AI is the catalyst. If anything, the SaaS-pocalypse is a reminder of why you should take their words more seriously.
Blame it all on cloud cowork
Financial market experts will have more to say about whether and how the SaaS sell-off triggered the global and Indian markets on Wednesday. But we can talk about the one thing that was the catalyst behind all this.
The trigger was an AI tool called Cloud Cowork, which was released by Anthropic in early January. Anthropic AI is the company behind the cloud chatbot, which has become the gold standard for coders in a very short time. Recently the cloud has gained a lot of buzz in the tech industry due to its special edition called Cloud Code, which is aimed at software developers.
Encouraged by its success, Anthropic decided that not only software developers but the rest of the world needed an autonomous version of cloud AI. It turned out to be Claude Cowork, an autonomous AI that aims to help not just coders and tech workers but almost all white-collar workers do their work, whether that work is payroll calculations or analyzing the day’s stock market, complete with legal angles for the client who is paying for it.
Cloud Cowork was released on January 12. “When we released Cloud Code, we expected developers to use it for coding. They did – and then immediately started using it for almost everything,” the company announced in a blog. “This inspired us to create Cowork: an easy way for anyone – not just developers – to work the same way with the cloud.”
The idea is that you can now install Cloud Cowork on your computer, give it access to certain files or folders and tell it to go to work. This work can be of different types. Maybe you can ask the cloud to look at your files and then perform data analysis and visualization without the need for any other tools. Or you can point it at some data set and ask it to create an automated process.
And then came Cloud Cowork plugins
But SaaS companies were not immediately impacted. The day of 12th January passed well for him. Even the next few weeks were good for him. Instead, they were attacked on February 3, a few days after Anthropic enhanced Cloud Cowork. On January 30, the company released some plugins for its tool. Treat these plugins as pre-recorded instructions for dealing with different types of workflows.
“With Cowork, you set goals and the cloud delivers ready, professional work,” the company said. “Plugins let you go further: tell the cloud how you want the work done, what tools and data to pull, how to handle critical workflows, and which slash commands to highlight so your team gets even better and more consistent results.”
A total of 11 plugins were released: Productivity, Enterprise Search, Create or Customize Plugin, Sales, Finance, Data, Legal, Marketing, Customer Support, Product Management, and Biology Research.
What can these plug-ins do? Very. Here’s an example of what finance can do, according to Anthropic. This plugin can “perform financial analysis, build models, and track key metrics.”
Mother-in-law gets scared because of Claude Cowork
Plugins sour sentiment for SaaS. Although their value and utility have yet to be proven, it seems that much of their functionality essentially mirrors what many SaaS companies like Infosys, TCS, and others provide to their customers.
SaaS companies like TCS and Infosys have historically grown by hiring armies of junior engineers and other employees to handle automation for routine enterprise tasks. For this they are paid by the customers on hourly and daily basis. Now that Cowork can do these things at a fraction of the cost, the perception is that the clock is ticking for SaaS and SaaS jobs.
The crash signals investors are concerned that the advantage offered by traditional SaaS companies is eroding. If an agent can function autonomously across different software platforms, the need for expensive, specialized enterprise software subscriptions may be reduced. Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, himself claims that AI will eliminate 50 percent of white-collar jobs by 2030. The market’s “shoot first, ask questions later” reaction signals a deep fear that time may be running out for human-centric IT services.
