Investors have spent the past year watching artificial intelligence disrupt the software business.
Now it is coming for something bigger. Wall Street.
The pitch decks. The earnings models. The research reports. The compliance reviews. The work that armies of analysts get paid to do every day. AI is starting to do it.
We recently did a full breakdown of this shift on Ticker Take.
From chatbots to agents
Most people are familiar with AI through chatbots. You ask a question, it gives an answer.
But the latest version of AI is different. It is called an agent, and it does not just answer questions. It does the work.
Give it a goal, like reading an earnings transcript or building a financial model, and it figures out the steps and gets it done. That shift from advice to action is what this is really about.
Why Wall Street is next
Wall Street runs on the kind of work AI agents are best at. Reading documents, building models, comparing companies, writing summaries, filling out compliance forms. The work is structured and repetitive, which makes it a natural fit for these new tools.
That is why this is no longer a hypothetical. Anthropic, the maker of the AI assistant Claude, recently launched ten AI agents built specifically for financial services. A pitch builder. An earnings reviewer. A financial model builder. A compliance screener. If that sounds like the day-to-day workload of a junior bank analyst, that is the point.
And these are not pilot projects. JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, AIG, and Visa are already deploying it. Anthropic’s CEO has said enterprise demand is running far ahead of the company’s own forecasts.
Winners and losers
For the banks, this looks like an opportunity to do more with fewer people, which means higher margins.
For the software and data companies that sell into the banks, it is a real problem. If an AI agent can build a model, write a pitch, or pull comparable companies, banks need fewer software seats and fewer expensive data subscriptions.
That is why, every time AI takes another step forward, certain stocks take a step down. When Anthropic launched its financial agents, shares of major data providers including FactSet, Thomson Reuters, S&P Global, Moody’s, and Morningstar all came under pressure.
Not every software name is at risk, though. Companies whose work AI cannot easily replicate, including chip design specialists like Cadence and Synopsys, or names tied to deep enterprise workflows like Microsoft, SAP, Workday, and Veeva, should hold up better.
The Ticker Take
For fifteen years, software was one big trade. That trade is over.
The next chapter is about which companies, and which workers, own the things AI cannot replace. Everyone else is going to have to figure out where they fit.
Jon Erlichman is a BNN Bloomberg contributor and the host of Ticker Take on YouTube.
Read more Ticker Take from Jon Erlichman:

