The sharp sell‑off across software names in recent weeks has prompted questions from investors, many centred on whether the rapid rise of agentic artificial intelligence marks the beginning of a deeper structural shift in enterprise technology.

The catalyst was the latest demonstration from Anthropic’s Claude platform, whose new “Cowork” and “Code” capabilities promise to automate tasks that were once firmly in human hands, from drafting documents and synthesising research to generating production‑ready code. Equity markets were quick to draw conclusions, punishing enterprise software companies without drawing any distinctions, based on the assumption that their software tools and embedded long term relationships were significantly devalued.

Discussions among technology specialists, both within M&G and across the broader industry, agree that the market move has been overdone. Rather than reflecting the pace or scale of disruption in the software environment, prices have been driven lower by perceived risk rather than evidence that software company valuations have been impaired by the AI revolution. The degree of weakness bears little resemblance to what is actually happening inside real enterprise businesses. Instead of a measured repricing based on a quantifiable change in credit quality, this has been a largely sentiment-driven reaction to a headline‑grabbing demonstration.





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