AI Anxiety Wipes $22 Billion From Software Giants

Fears that AI will upend traditional software businesses sparked a broad selloff. Monday.com fell 30% and SAP dropped as much as 7.1%, wiping almost €22 billion at the session low.

Smaller peers like Sage and Dassault also slid, following Monday’s slide among Salesforce and Workday. RBC Capital Markets said the “death of software due to AI” narrative is pressuring valuations and likely driving short-term volatility.

Concerns focus on AI enabling applications to be built faster and at much lower cost, a shift OpenAI’s Sam Altman called a coming “fast fashion era very soon.” The anxiety has spread to research and consulting, with Gartner cutting its full-year outlook last week as analysts said the weak result worsened worries about AI research tools.

Board directors are pressing CIOs after multimillion-dollar AI investments stall at pilot stage and spark customer backlash. The article attributes the shortfall to fragmented, low-quality data that chokes agentic AI systems.

McKinsey reports 72% of large companies cite data management as their top obstacle to scaling AI. Siloed, inconsistent records across applications deny enterprises a single source of truth and erode trust in AI outputs.

Without “intelligent data” that is governed, context-rich, and real-time, AI remains an expensive science project. Firms building real-time data backbones are already powering fraud-detection agents and customer-service copilots while rivals debate governance frameworks.

Delta is using AI to help adjust airfare prices faster in response to market forces. It is testing the system on about 3 percent of fares now, with plans to reach 20 percent by the end of the year.

Delta says it is not creating custom, per-person prices and that all customers currently see the same fare. The AI-driven pricing test is limited to certain flights and centers on faster adjustments, not individualized pricing.

Fares may move up or down more quickly as AI accelerates price changes. The announcement sparked fears about custom pricing, but the report states those practices are not in use today.

Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence begins classes for its first Bachelor of Science in AI cohort on August 18. The university welcomes 115 undergraduates from 25 countries, with Emiratis about a quarter of the class.

Founded in 2020 as a dedicated AI institution, MBZUAI previously offered only postgraduate programs and is also enrolling 300 new master’s and PhD students this year. The bachelor’s degree offers two tracks—engineering and business—allowing students to choose between technical depth and an entrepreneurship-oriented path.

The intake is highly selective, with more than 2,000 applications and about 5% accepted. Students gain access to industry partnerships, including Microsoft, and internship opportunities during their studies.

Bowling Green, Kentucky ran a 33-day online “town hall” that drew almost 8,000 residents and more than one million inputs. County officials used the open-source Pol.is platform and Google Jigsaw’s Sensemaker AI to turn the deluge into a public policy report.

Sensemaker surfaced 2,370 ideas that at least 80% of participants supported, ranging from more healthcare specialists to repurposed retail space. Jigsaw says the AI workflow saved the county about 28 staff workdays and broadened participation through automatic translation.

Officials called it the largest town hall in America, dwarfing the usual crowd of about 23 attendees. The exercise shows anonymized, AI-assisted engagement can uncover broad consensus across political and demographic lines.