Nikesh Arora's theory of the SaaSpocalypse

The Palo Alto Networks CEO on which software AI eats first, and cutting through the Mythos hype. Also: What's going on with the White House AI safety EO?

I asked Nikesh Arora to put his investor hat back on. He was Masa Son’s president and COO at SoftBank before taking over Palo Alto Networks in 2018. I expected a defense of software. Instead, on whether Wall Street investors are right that AI will gut a chunk of the SaaS world, he gave me an unusually candid read for a prominent tech CEO: “I think they’re getting more right than you think.”

We talked on May 14 at an intimate lunch I co-hosted with AlixPartners and a room of tech leaders in San Francisco. His own stock had been swept into the SaaSpocalypse. Palo Alto dropped about 7% on its February earnings.

Most software, Arora argued during our conversation, is a pile of data wrapped in a user interface that a product manager hand-built to anticipate how you'd want to reach and interact with it. His bet is that the roughly $1 trillion flowing into AI infrastructure over the next year will yield models capable of generating that interface on the fly, collapsing the long tail of hand-designed UIs. "80% of UI will go away," he predicted.