Tillman's Software Monday Morning Missives

Research evidence excerpt

Tillman's Software Monday Morning Missives

Truist Securities

Equity Research Report May 18, 2026

TMT: Application Software and

Agentic AI Tillman's Software Monday Morning

Missives

Marc Benioff fills in on a tech podcast, OpenAI week in review, Anthropic week in Terry Tillman review, open-source LLM provider DeepSeek seeking first external funding targeting

404-926-5362

Terry.Tillman@truist.com a $45 billion - $50 billion valuation, a16z shares surprising data points on positive call

center and broader customer service hiring trends, Recursive Superintelligence raises

$650 million to build self-improving AI models, legal tech company Clio surpasses $500 Connor Passarella million ARR, GTM/revenue AI platform Gong reports accelerating growth and surpasses 212-326-6153

Connor.Passarella@truist.com $500 million ARR, and Glean shares seven-stage lifecycle for agent success.

Giancarlo Valle Marc Benioff on Popular Technology Podcast; Interesting Salesforce

212-537-9006 Perspective; Market Will Latch on to Anthropic Spend Comment. Marc Benioff, Co-

Giancarlo.Valle@Research.truist.com Founder, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce (CRM, Buy) subbed in for one of the regular

co-hosts of the All-In Podcast this past Friday. Not surprisingly, his perspective on the

12 Page Document current "SaaSpocalypse" and rerating of public software stocks was discussed at length.

Mr. Benioff seemed accepting of the fact that negative cycles have happened a number

of times across his career that spans four decades. He suggested there is currently

Reasons for this report a hypnosis around AI that is gripping the markets; however, his observation was that

a lot of enterprise software continues to be sold. While AI disruption could impact the