OpenAI just gave software stocks a beating with its latest push into enterprise work.

After the company on Wednesday unveiled a new product aimed at making AI agents more effective for customers, software stocks like Workday, Atlassian and HubSpot plunged.

The product, called Presence, increases OpenAI’s competition with established software providers. As first reported by Business Insider, the tool allows companies to create security barriers, permissions and policies around how AI agents use company data. It is intended to automate work in customer service, sales, internal processes and other areas.

The launch is part of OpenAI’s broader strategy to build software and governance capabilities around its AI models. It pushes OpenAI further into the SaaS, or software as a service, market, where established companies have been nervous about the impacts of AI coding tools and AI agents.

Stocks in the sector fell on Wednesday and Thursday, already a tough stretch amid rising oil prices, rising bond yields and worrying earnings from Big Tech companies.

Since Wednesday morning, stock prices have fallen for Workday (-9.9%), Atlassian (-11.8%), HubSpot (-12.7%), Salesforce (-7.7%), and Okta (-4.2%).

In a note to investors, analysts at TD Cowen wrote that Presence’s announcement was likely a “major reason” for a 3% selloff in the IGV Software Index on Wednesday and further declines on Thursday.

“Presence ships with many of the AI ​​agent capabilities offered by SaaS vendors, including packaging LLM reasoning + data access + policy/governance control,” the analysts wrote.

Derrick Wood, a technology analyst on TD Cowen’s team, told Business Insider that among enterprise application companies that overlap with Presence, he sees the sales and customer service fields as particularly exposed.

Wood dates back to early October as precedent, when a series of OpenAI blog posts showcased internal AI tools. The tools resembled SaaS offerings, and OpenAI’s releases sent software stocks like HubSpot, DocuSign and ZoomInfo reeling.

At the time, analysts at TD Cowen wrote that the reaction was overblown, but noted that “days like this remind investors how much concern there is in the market around ‘AI power software.'”

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

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