Mandeep Singh, global head of Technology Research at Bloomberg Intelligence, joins the podcast to provide an update on the growing impact of artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge innovations. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe Here to the ROI Podcast &amp; other First Trust Market News Website: First Trust Portfolios Connect with us on LinkedIn: First Trust LinkedIn Follow us on X: First Trust on X Subscribe to the First Trust YouTube Channel Subscribe to the ROI Podcast YouTube Channel

Ep 73 | Mandeep Singh | Is the SaaS-Pocalypse Over, and Where Are We in the AI Capex Cycle? | ROI Podcast

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Where Are We in the AI Capex Cycle? Is the SaaS-Pocalypse Over, and What's the Next Industry That Will Be Boosted or Perhaps Disintermediated by Artificial Intelligence? Joining me to make sense of these questions and more is Mandeep Singh, Global Head of Technology Research at Bloomberg Intelligence. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the First Trust ROI Podcast.

Mandeep, thank you again for joining us on the podcast. I really enjoyed our conversation. I think it was about a year and a half ago that you and I first chatted. But there's a lot that's happened since then. There's been literally hundreds of billions of dollars of CapEx announced. And it seems all of the AI companies are pursuing what they call AGI or general intelligence. And so that's my first question for you.

Mandeep Singh, have we reached a point where AGI has been reached? Are we going to reach that point? What's your perspective on that? Mandeep Singh, Well, I don't think there is any official definition of AGI yet. So I'll leave it to the Frontier Labs to agree on, you know, something that they can say, these are the parameters, this is how we accomplish AGI. And we haven't heard that yet.

But what has transpired over the past, I would say, 12 months or so is, one, we have seen this huge inflection point when it comes to adoption of coding agents. And it feels like, you know, if I had to come up with my own definition of AGI, it would definitely include functionality like that, where you can code anything with a prompt.

And, you know, the computer can understand your instructions. You can be very descriptive about what you want to do. And it's all about ideas and creativity. And these tools, which is what I think will be part of that AGI definition, facilitate that creativity.

And to me, that is where the industry will keep improving. These models are constantly improving. And at some point, we'll say, okay, they can do X, Y, and Z. And this is the definition of AGI.

Yeah. Well, that brings me to the SaaSpocalypse, right? The software as a service companies were all re-rated this year, because those coding agents are so good, that I think a lot of the fear was that every time Anthropic made a new announcement of a version of Claude,

that consumers, enterprises were just going to replace their subscriptions with Vibe-coded software. Is that process over? Is the SaaSpocalypse, as has been coined, done? We have begun to see a bit of a rebound in some of those software companies. Where do we stand now? Are we through that? Are we going to see a rebound of these companies?

I'm asking you to predict the future there, but where are we in the SaaSpocalypse? I mean, look, this is one of the biggest technology shifts that we are witnessing. And we have witnessed quite a few over the past two, three decades. You know, when you think about the on-prem to cloud shift, the desktop to mobile shift, like th...

Ep 73 | Mandeep Singh | Is the SaaS-Pocalypse Over, and Where Are We in the AI Capex Cycle? | ROI Podcast

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Ep 73 | Mandeep Singh | Is the SaaS-Pocalypse Over, and Where Are We in the AI Capex Cycle? | ROI Podcast

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.