Gartner: Business Software Spend Will Grow a Stunning 14.7% in 2026 to $1.4 Trillion — Up From 11.5% in 2025. Are You Grabbing It?
Gartner just updated its 2026 IT spending forecast, and the headline numbers are even bigger than what we covered back in the fall. Total worldwide IT spending is now projected to hit $6.15 trillion in 2026, up 10.8% year-over-year. That’s revised up from the...
The 2026+ Sales Team: What It Actually Looks Like
Not every role goes away. Not every AI works without humans. But if you’re still running a 2021 sales org, you’re already behind. I’ve been getting a ton of questions about what the sales team actually looks like in 2026. And I’ve been living...
Customer Support Hiring Has Fallen 65% in Just 2 Years. It’s The One Category AI Has Almost Destroyed. But It’s Not The Last.
New data from Pave across 386,500 new hires tells a striking story: the percentage of new hires going into Customer Support has dropped from 8.30% in Q4 ’23 to just 2.88% in Q3 ’25. That’s a 65% decline in two years. And the curve is accelerating —...
What Folks Are Really Vibe Coding Today. (It’s Not Building Their Own Salesforce.)
Anton Osika, the CEO of Lovable, just shared something really interesting — their top 4 actual use cases for vibe coding in businesses right now. Lovable is now the second-fastest growing software product among businesses on Ramp. These are the main use cases for...
What We Actually Learned Deploying 20+ AI Agents Across Our Entire Go-To-Market (8 Months In)
There’s a growing wave of AI agent skepticism on LinkedIn right now. And honestly? Some of it is earned. A lot of founders bought an AI SDR, didn’t train it, and got garbage results. Then they posted about how “AI agents don’t work.” But...
Databricks at $5.4B, Growing 65%. Is It the Most Unstoppable Company in B2B Right Now?
So we talk a lot about growth rates slowing across B2B and B2B + AI. And for many companies, they have. Snowflake is growing ~25-30%. Most public software companies can’t even crack 40%. The median growth rate on the BVP Cloud Index has been grinding lower for...
Inference is the New Sales & Marketing Spend
High inference costs are OK—if they make your product so viral and so competitive it almost sells itself Here’s the counterintuitive insight that’s reshaping how the smartest AI founders think about unit economics: Your inference costs aren’t your...
Google: Actually, AI Hasn’t Hurt Search at All. In Fact, It’s Accelerating It.
Remember the narrative? ChatGPT was going to kill Google Search. Perplexity was the “Google killer.” AI was going to make the search box obsolete. Well, Google just reported Q4 2025 earnings, and the data tells a very different story. Google Search revenue...
AI Gross Margins Are Up, R&D Spend Is Way Up, AI Pricing is a Mess: 5 Key Takeaways from ICONIQ’s State of AI Report
ICONIQ Capital just released their January 2026 “State of AI: Bi-Annual Snapshot” report, surveying approximately 300 executives at software companies building AI products. The respondents include CEOs, Heads of Engineering, Heads of AI, Heads of Product,...
Inference Costs Average 23% of Revenue at AI B2B Companies. How Will You Pay For It?
ICONIQ’s latest State of AI report has a chart that summarizes a question many B2B founders and boards think about constantly: How Much Should I Spend on AI Inference? At scaling-stage AI companies, model inference now averages 23% of total AI product costs....
The 2026 SaaS Crash: It’s Not What You Think
Software stocks just entered a bear market. IGV is down 22% from its highs. January 29 was the worst single day for software since the Covid crash. ServiceNow dropped 11% despite beating earnings for the ninth straight quarter. Microsoft shed $360 billion in market...
The Best AI Startups Do the Training For You. It’s On You to Make the Agent Awesome — Not Your Customers.
Think about how customers bought enterprise software in 2019. Or even in 2023. You’d get sold by a sales rep. Then you’d hire an Accenture or other third party to deploy it over 9-12 months. And you’d hope and pray it worked like the sales rep...
ICONIQ’s Latest State of AI Report: PLG vs. SLG in the Age of AI; The Real Data on Inference Spend; and The Spike in FDEs
ICONIQ just released their January 2026 “State of AI” report surveying ~300 software executives building AI products. Here are the 10 metrics that matter most. 1. Just About Even Mix Between Sales-Led and Product-Led Growth in AI B2B Not a surprise per se...
Why Most B2B Companies Are Failing at AI (And How to Avoid It) with Intercom’s CPO
How Intercom Bet Everything on AI—And Built Fin to 1M+ Resolutions Per Week Paul Adams is Chief Product Officer at Intercom, leading Product Management, Product Design, Data Science, and Research. He joined when Intercom was just a 14-person company after first...
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