Is your LLM your new competitor?
If you are a software company, selling for example legal services, investing heavily in AI solutions, then there is a good chance that you woke up with a headache yesterday and the sense that your market might disappear overnight.
Really.
Claude announced its Claude Cowork Legal automation tool, as an extension of Claude Cowork.
Agent style plugins tucked Claude will do contract reviews, manage regulatory workflows and legal briefings. All of which are typically associated with costly subscriptions to legal software suppliers.
Their market potentially just evaporated. If this can happen in the legal field, is your field at risk.
Unsurprisingly, the market reacted strongly, with estimates indicating a loss between $285B and $300B. Those hit include Adobe and Salesforce, but also Thompson Reuters, Legalzoom.com and the London Stock Exchange, all of which provide some form of legal tools or research databases.
New plugins include: Sales, Marketing, Productivity, Product Management, Legal, Finance, Data, Customer Research and Bio Research.
If you thought you had a great strategic moat, through your specialisation and the likely competitive dynamic, then it is time to think again.
And to recognise that the AI companies are on a mission to take the biggest part of the pie, at the cost of others.
SOURCE
Claude Legal Plugin: https://claude.com/plugins/legal
Market Reaction: https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/software-slump-drags-down-private-fund-managers-6f840d0c
BESCI AI OPINION
How quickly before a full ERP solution will be viable in Claude, CoPilot or ChatGPT? No more SAP, more likely to be a plug in, with data held in a less structured form, maybe.
This gives me a discomfort in the move to take even more of the pie, to actively broaden and threaten other industries, rather than be their 'vendor' of choice - which opens up greater revenue margins - transfers power to the AI organisations and ultimately removes competition.
What is left will be very niche and require proprietary knowledge not available to the big AI firms - until they consolidate and 'buy out' the knowledge - either by buying the niche firm, or buying the talent that built it.
