I’ve been thinking about a different way to look at AI risk in software and data businesses.
AI doesn’t necessarily need to replace a product to weaken its economics.
The question I find more useful is:
**What is the economic bottleneck that AI still has to pass through?**
Experian is an interesting example.
A bank might increasingly use AI agents to make credit decisions, but those agents still need credit histories, identity data and fraud signals.
The interface can change quite a lot while the underlying data remains valuable.
Adobe looks very different to me.
AI attacks something much closer to what Adobe historically monetized: creating and editing through its tools.
Adobe still has PDF, Acrobat and strong distribution, but I find it harder to identify the scarce layer that an AI agent still has to pass through.
RELX looks closer to Experian. The interface may change, but legal, scientific and risk information still has to come from somewhere.
Intuit is more complicated and probably sits somewhere in between. QuickBooks owns valuable accounting history and workflows, but I can imagine an agent taking over much more of the actual interaction. Payments, payroll and tax may matter more than the interface itself.
So I’m becoming less interested in asking whether a beaten-down software company will **“survive AI.”**
I’m more interested in asking:
**What remains scarce if the interface changes — and who can still charge for it?**
I ended up applying this to Experian, RELX, Intuit, Adobe, MSCI and S&P Global.
MSCI and S&P Global were also interesting because I don’t think their recent stagnation is as clean a valuation dislocation as it first looks. Both had already gone up enormously beforehand.
**I’m still not fully sure where Adobe belongs here. If agents end up using Adobe’s formats and tools in the background, maybe the bottleneck is stronger than I’m giving it credit for. Intuit is also less obvious to me than Experian or RELX.**
I wrote up the full comparison and included a simple diagram here:
[**https://michaelhillaert1.substack.com/p/what-still-gets-paid-if-ai-changes**](https://michaelhillaert1.substack.com/p/what-still-gets-paid-if-ai-changes?utm_source=chatgpt.com)
Curious where people disagree.
**Which of these businesses still owns something an AI agent can’t easily route around — and where am I underestimating the moat?**
