Australia’s largest software company, listed on the Nasdaq, now finds itself grouped with major enterprise platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP and Adobe as investors reassess what rapid advances in generative AI mean for traditional tools used by human developers. In recent weeks the launch of Anthropic’s Cowork has unsettled markets, with one leading Australian software stock sliding about 16% as traders try to work out whether long‑standing products built around human workflows can keep pace with AI agents that write, test and organise code on demand.
Cowork sits on top of Anthropic’s Claude Code system and gives developers and non‑technical staff simple natural language controls to generate code, clean up disorganised files, build presentations or process receipts without jumping between multiple applications. Industry analysts say these kinds of AI tools are no longer just code assistants, they are fast evolving into co‑managers of the entire development process, which puts direct pressure on legacy software that was designed to help people track tasks, tickets and projects manually. That matters for companies whose core products, used for issue tracking, collaboration and project management, are tightly tied to how large teams of human developers work today.
In response, Australia’s flagship software group has been pushing a strategy that treats AI as an amplifier rather than a replacement, arguing that demand for skilled technologists will grow as organisations invest more in AI‑driven products and services. The company has rolled out a new AI‑focused developer platform called Rovo and completed two sizeable AI‑related acquisitions in 2025 to deepen its capabilities, while signalling that its tools will increasingly need to integrate with and govern AI‑powered workflows rather than just human ones. Analysts suggest this shift will likely require changes to its business model and product portfolio so it can move from simply managing human tasks to overseeing fleets of AI agents working alongside people.
The broader software industry appears to be entering a reset. Powerful AI offerings from OpenAI, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, Cursor and Anthropic are turning software creation into an agent‑driven process where humans supervise and refine instead of writing every line themselves. Research firms say this flips the traditional model, where humans led and AI assisted, toward a structure where AI agents increasingly lead while people guide and correct. Venture investors are already warning that software as a service providers that lack scale or sell relatively simple products seem most at risk of being outbuilt by small highly skilled teams using advanced AI tools that can spin up competing products in days rather than months. How quickly incumbents adapt, with deeper AI integration, new pricing models and tools built to manage AI agents themselves, will likely determine who thrives and who is left behind as this new wave of automation accelerates.
