AI’s new power brokers: Ramp’s chief economist and the 24-yr-old taking on Big AI — 3/12/2026
Speakers
Deirdre Bosa — Host, CNBC
— CNBC anchor, tech reporter
Summary
- Anthropic's Claude has overtaken OpenAI in enterprise growth, with 1 in 4 businesses on Ramp now paying for Claude, up from 1 in 25 a year ago.
- OpenAI experienced its worst month ever in Ramp's index, dropping 1.5% in adoption, while Anthropic grew 4.9% and now wins 70% of head-to-head matchups for new business.
- A rumored tie-up between Blackstone and Anthropic could create a massive top-down distribution channel for AI across traditional PE-owned sectors like retail and healthcare.
- The "SaaS apocalypse" is accelerating, with legacy providers like Salesforce facing pressure from new AI-native startups and agentic workflows.
- Axiom, a $1.6B startup founded by a 24-year-old Stanford dropout, is pioneering formal verification for AI-generated code to ensure zero-defect software for high-stakes industries, signaling a shift from probabilistic chatbots to deterministic AI reasoning.
Trade Ideas
Anthropic already has more demand than it can provide for. Anthropic turns away users. It has rate limits so usage limits across all of its plans even for enterprise. Amazon is the primary cloud provider and a multi-billion dollar investor in Anthropic. If Anthropic is maxing out its capacity and experiencing explosive enterprise growth (now used by 1 in 4 businesses), AWS will capture massive, guaranteed compute revenue as they scale infrastructure to meet this bottlenecked demand. LONG. Amazon's cloud division is perfectly positioned to monetize Anthropic's hyper-growth and current capacity constraints. Anthropic could shift compute workloads to Google Cloud (another investor), or OpenAI could release a new model that regains enterprise dominance.
This is where you get all the conversation about the SaaS apocalypse and that all these companies and Salesforce is going to have to refigure out how it's operating and running and how it's selling its product. Legacy software-as-a-service companies rely on per-seat pricing models. As AI agents become capable of doing the work of human sales or customer service reps, enterprise headcount will shrink, directly cannibalizing Salesforce's core seat-based revenue model. AVOID. Legacy SaaS giants face structural headwinds as AI agents replace human software users. Salesforce successfully pivots its pricing model to outcome-based or agent-based billing, capturing the value of AI productivity for itself.
We just got our CNBC Mac Mini. We're still really thinking about how we set it up. We're not going to let it touch anything in the organization... I think Nvidia at GTC is even going to have its own way of setting up your own open claw. Enterprises are terrified of data leaks from cloud-based AI. The solution is local, self-hosted, air-gapped AI models. To run these highly capable models locally and securely, enterprises will need to purchase massive amounts of on-premise Nvidia hardware rather than just renting cloud compute. LONG. The shift toward secure, self-hosted enterprise AI creates a massive new hardware upgrade cycle for Nvidia outside of traditional hyperscalers. Apple or AMD capture the local/edge compute market, or enterprises decide cloud security is sufficient, reducing the need for on-premise hardware.
OpenAI had its worst month ever in your index, down one and a half percent... 70% of head-to-head matchups against OpenAI versus Anthropic now go to Anthropic. Microsoft's massive valuation premium is heavily tied to its exclusive partnership with OpenAI and the integration of OpenAI models into Copilot. If enterprise customers are actively choosing Anthropic over OpenAI for new deployments, Microsoft's AI revenue growth projections and enterprise software moat may be at risk. WATCH. Microsoft's AI dominance is showing its first real cracks in enterprise market share. OpenAI releases a highly anticipated next-generation model (like GPT-5) that instantly reclaims the performance crown and enterprise market share.
The information reported a potential tie up between private equity and anthropic, in this case, the Blackstone with Anthropic... private equity is very different than like each individual enterprise deciding whether or not to use AI. I mean it can just be mandated from the top down. If Blackstone secures a strategic partnership with the leading enterprise AI model, it can force rapid AI adoption across its massive portfolio of non-tech companies (retail, hospitals, logistics). This top-down mandate will drastically cut operational costs and boost margins across Blackstone's holdings, increasing the firm's overall returns. LONG. Blackstone gains a unique structural advantage in modernizing legacy businesses through forced AI integration. The rumored tie-up falls through, or portfolio companies face severe implementation hurdles and security risks when deploying AI at scale.
Up Next
This CNBC video, published March 12, 2026, features Ara Karazian, Deirdre Bosa discussing AMZN, CRM, NVDA, MSFT, BX. 5 trade ideas extracted by AI with direction and confidence scoring.
Speakers: Ara Karazian, Deirdre Bosa · Tickers: AMZN, CRM, NVDA, MSFT, BX