Wrap-Up on Recent Conference Season; Takeaways from the Trade Floors

Research evidence excerpt

Wrap-Up on Recent Conference Season; Takeaways from the Trade Floors

TD SECURITIES (USA) LLC SECTOR NOTE

May 14, 2026

■Software Wrap-Up on Recent Conference Season;

Takeaways from the Trade Floors

Derrick Wood, CFA THE TD COWEN INSIGHT

415 646 7370

We highlight broad-level takeaways from conferences we recently attended, including ADBE's

derrick.wood@tdsecurities.com

Summit, NOW's Knowledge, SAP's Sapphire and TEAM's Team conferences, which varied from

Andrew Sherman, CFA ~5k to ~25k people in attendance. Overall, feedback suggests there's still a lot of work ahead

617 946 3728 for these SaaS co's to meaningfully partake in today's AI investment cycle & drive accelerated

andrew.sherman@tdsecurities.com

growth, but progress continues.

Cole Erskine

646 562 1467 Key Points

cole.erskine@tdsecurities.com

■From a product announcement standpoint, there was a common thread. Every SaaS vendor

Jared Jungjohann seems to be 1) going headless (or "appless" as SAP puts it), as the SaaS center of gravity is

646 562 1416 shifting away from the native UI to the context/governance layer, and the engagement layer

jared.jungjohann@tdsecurities.com has more optionality w/ the human front door coming from either 1st party or 3rd party

conversational agents; 2) rolling out new consumption & hybrid pricing strategies, incl.

changes to API data access policies and new outcome-based pricing; & 3) pitching vendor-

specific knowledge graphs & semantic understanding as key differentiators and reasons

why they have the right to win the context/orchestration layer that sits above LLMs. The

challenge is that there is a tremendous amount of change taking hold in SaaS architectures

& pricing models, sending co's into uncharted territory with so much evolution in flight.