No one likes doing like these crazy tasks inside of Workday. No employee likes interacting with Workday. No one wants to go into this portal. And so if you can go out there and solve these problems, there's a huge pot to go after. If you think about where you have to go capture these customers, if someone has already become a customer of Workday or already become a customer of Service Now or Salesforce, it is so hard to rip them off. That's why these gross dollar retentions are what they are.

They're the most standards for a reason. We're seeing the cracks in the most defensible

businesses in the world, and it's a really exciting time, and the race is on.

What does it take to replace one of the most entrenched systems in enterprise software?

For the past two decades, platforms like Workday have become the backbone of how companies manage people, data, and operations.

They're deeply embedded, highly defensible, and nearly impossible to rip out.

But platform shifts change the rules.

Just as cloud transformed enterprise software in the 2000s,

AI is creating a new opportunity to rethink how these systems work,

and whether they should exist in their current form at all.

The question now is not whether these systems are valuable, but whether they can evolve

fast enough.

Elena Berger speaks with Joe Schmidt, partner on the enterprise team at A16.

Hello everyone and welcome to monitoring the situation.

I am here with Joe Schmidt, the fourth.

Joe is a... Thank you for making that delineation. I appreciate it.

Joe is a partner on the enterprise team at A16C, and we are here to actually, I think first just answer a big

important question, which is why has the Enterprise team been writing so many obituaries lately,

and what have these eulogies been for? Yeah, no, thanks for having me on. It's excited to be here.

Yeah, it's funny calling them eulogies. And I think that this piece was intended to be much more balanced than maybe people have taken it to be.

But I think that, you know, if you just think about where we are in the cycle right now with enterprise software, a lot of the biggest businesses that are out there today were kind of built in the last kind of technology shift, which is obviously the shift from on-prem to cloud.

And that's really the big opportunity for most companies that are being built, selling to big enterprise buyers, is basically adopting some big shift and then building their platform around it.

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