Saying "not afraid" out loud, but filing the truth: This year, 27 SaaS companies have listed AI agents as a competitive risk in SEC documents

According to 1M AI News monitoring, so far this year, 27 software companies have listed AI agents as a competitive risk factor in their securities filing, compared to just 7 during the same period last year. However, the executives of these companies have generally downplayed this threat during earnings calls, creating a stark contrast between the filing language and public statements.

The 10-K filing submitted by design tool Figma last month stated that agentic AI "may alter how people access and use digital products, reducing reliance on traditional software applications." However, during the same earnings call, CEO Dylan Field stated, "Humans will continue to use software, and so will agents," and mentioned, "If you are willing to entrust critical tasks to an agent for unsupervised execution now, you are a very brave person." Figma's current stock price is below last year's IPO price.

The 2-month annual report of customer relationship management platform HubSpot directly mentioned that customers can build their own CRM tools with AI, even specifically referring to "vibe coding" (natural language programming) as a potential alternative path. The company's stock price has dropped by nearly half in the past six months. The 10-K filing of enterprise human resources platform Workday at the beginning of March acknowledged that the company may face challenges in "maintaining market differentiation" and warned that their newly introduced Flex Credits (a billing model based on agent usage) "may encounter customer resistance." Former CEO Carl Eschenbach also said in January of this year, "AI is a tailwind for us, definitely not a headwind," but he has since stepped down.

Adobe's January annual report also pointed out the "increasingly competitive landscape brought by companies offering generative and agentic AI solutions," but outgoing CEO Shantanu Narayen stated last week that the company's products are "uniquely designed" to meet the needs of the AI agent era. Adobe's stock price has already fallen by 28% this year.

This wave of panic has been dubbed the "SaaS End Times" (SaaSpocalypse) by investors. After Anthropic released the new agent tool Claude in February, the software sector saw a market value evaporation of approximately $850 billion within a few days. Since 2005, the SEC has required public companies to disclose significant risk factors in their filings, a mechanism that objectively allows management to make more optimistic predictions in public forums while the filings bear the risk disclosure obligation.