S&B Research and the Prisoners of Wallstreet - The Forgotten - moomoo Community

TEXT START: The AI rally has created clear winners—and clear prisoners.

The Dissection

This is a rotation thesis disguised as structural analysis. It argues that Wall Street has overpaid for AI infrastructure while underpricing the enterprise software that will supposedly convert AI into revenue. CRM platforms are presented as indispensable control centers because they possess customer data, permissions, workflows and distribution.

The article’s real job is to rehabilitate software valuations and defend seat-based CRM economics. It converts AI’s principal threat—automation of cognitive labor—into a sales opportunity for the vendors whose revenues depend on that labor remaining economically necessary.

The Core Fallacy

The text confuses being useful during the transition with being permanently valuable after the transition.

CRM systems may provide data, permissions and workflow context. That does not mean incumbent CRM vendors will retain pricing power. AI agents can make the interface, seat model and even portions of the workflow layer less important. The system of record can become a backend utility while value migrates to cheaper agent layers, open protocols, hyperscalers or customers’ own orchestration systems.

The article also assumes that AI-generated productivity will preserve human employment. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, the opposite is the competitive default: if an agent allows one revenue worker to cover the output of five, firms do not need to restore all five seats merely because more activity becomes possible. They retain the savings, compress headcount and demand more output from fewer humans. “Human-plus-agent” is not evidence of durable human participation; it is often the intermediate form of replacement.

The article mistakes a transitional hybrid workforce for a stable endpoint.

Hidden Assumptions

• Companies will resume hiring in sales, marketing, service and customer success rather than permanently reducing labor demand.
• Human relationships will remain economically necessary at scale, despite agents becoming cheaper, faster and increasingly competent.
• CRM vendors can monetize both human seats and digital workers without cannibalizing seat revenue or triggering price competition.
• AI agents will remain dependent on incumbent CRM platforms instead of abstracting away from them or making their interfaces interchangeable.
• Proprietary data and switching costs constitute durable moats rather than lag defenses.
• Enterprises will pay CRM vendors for AI productivity instead of capturing the savings through lower software spend.
• Greater customer productivity will expand total commercial activity enough to offset reduced labor and license intensity.
• Infrastructure overbuilding will make software relatively attractive, even though software itself can be rapidly commoditized by the same automation wave.
• A diverse list of Salesforce, ServiceNow, HubSpot, Oracle, SAP, Adobe, Freshworks, Palantir, Zeta Global, Atlassian and UiPath represents one coherent trade. It does not. These firms have materially different exposure to data ownership, workflow control, AI margins, customer budgets and displacement risk.
• Market valuation recovery is treated as a catalyst rather than an outcome that must be earned through durable cash-flow economics.

Social Function

Primarily copium, ideological anesthetic and partial truth, with a layer of transition management.

The partial truth is real: enterprise data, permissions, integrations and workflow context matter, and infrastructure alone does not produce business outcomes. CRM platforms may capture meaningful value during the early deployment phase.

The anesthetic lies in presenting this transitional dependence as permanent sovereignty. The article reassures software investors that AI will increase human seats, add digital-worker revenue and deepen switching costs simultaneously. That is a convenient fantasy of limitless monetization: the worker survives, the agent is added, the vendor raises prices, and the customer’s productivity gains somehow do not weaken the vendor’s bargaining position.

It also performs elite self-exoneration. The labor-displacing mechanism is renamed “productivity,” layoffs are framed as temporary mistakes, and the possibility of rehiring is used as evidence that the mass employment circuit will recover. The structural question—whether humans remain economically necessary—is replaced with the narrower question of whether CRM vendors can sell more software during the transition.

The Verdict

This is a credible short-term software-recovery narrative built on a weak long-term theory of labor and value capture. CRM vendors may benefit as AI is initially embedded into existing enterprise workflows, but their data and workflow positions are temporary moats, not proof of permanent indispensability.

Under the Discontinuity Thesis, the article’s central promise fails: AI does not need to preserve the human workforce to enrich CRM vendors. It only needs to make the remaining humans and the software they use more replaceable. The piece is therefore a market-timing pitch wearing the costume of structural inevitability.