This week, Anthropic pushed Claude directly inside Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint live inside the app. Run analysis in a spreadsheet. Turn it into a deck. Never leave either app.

The move is the latest escalation in what markets have been calling the SaaSpocalypse: a multi-front enterprise AI war that has wiped out over $1 trillion in SaaS market cap since January and left many tech leaders scrambling to explain why their business still matters.

The Bigger Story

In January, Anthropic launched Claude Cowork, an agentic platform built to automate knowledge work across enterprise tools. OpenAI answered on February 5 with Frontier, framing it explicitly as a layer that runs on top of Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow rather than through them. Then on February 23, OpenAI announced Frontier Alliances with McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, and Capgemini; going straight to Fortune 500 buyers and bypassing software vendors entirely.

Markets noticed. Thomson Reuters dropped 16% on record volume. LegalZoom sank nearly 20%. Jefferies called it a structural reset for the software industry.

This week’s Cowork update adds 10 role-specific plugins across finance, HR, legal, and design — open-source, portable, not locked to any vendor. Worth noting: Thomson Reuters CEO Steve Hasker appeared on Anthropic’s launch broadcast as a partner. The companies Wall Street says are getting killed are co-building with the company supposedly doing the killing.

Why You Should Care

If you’re a PMM or CI pro at a SaaS company, you’re likely inside this story.

“We have AI features too” isn’t a positioning strategy. The companies that hold their narrative will be the ones articulating what Anthropic and OpenAI can’t claim: data trust, compliance depth, workflow maturity that took a decade to build.

Watch the upcoming earnings calls closely. How they frame the threat (and what they quietly stop saying) is live positioning research. 🤖

Diary of a PMM is a new segment where I’m gonna be building in public! Sharing what I learn running product marketing at Klue: the mistakes I’m making in real time, the wins, and how competitive strategy weaves into everything from messaging to launches.

Consider it field notes from someone figuring it out live. I’d love to hear from y’all too on this one as we all know the PMM life can be an island 🏝️

So… I just went through my first round of analyst briefings and demos. Phewf. 

The first thing I learned is that whatever time you blocked off to work on this, just go ahead and triple it.

The second thing I learned is that nobody tells you just HOW much competitive strategy is quietly baked into that process. Understanding the evaluation criteria, reading between the lines on what analysts care about, what competitors are seeding, and figuring out which competitors are actually worth worrying about versus which ones show up in the same Magic Quadrant but not in your deals.

The biggest lesson: get into the criteria early. Understand what your strongest counter-claims are to your competitors’ loudest value props. Then make sure every claim is grounded in buyer truth; that means sharing an example, an outcome it helped a buyer, and the impact they felt. 

In a world where everyone is shipping AI features it can be easy to fall into the trap of feature selling to an analyst who’s just looked at roughly 47 different chat interfaces. Anchor what you share in real buyer pains and outcomes (and then subtly weave in how and why you solve this better for them than the competition).

That’s all for today! How have you approached analyst relations? I’d love to hear what’s worked.

The gap between when CI gets built and when it reaches a rep in a live deal is where most compete programs lose. Klue’s new Microsoft 365 integration is built to close that gap across Teams, Dynamics, Copilot, SharePoint, and OneDrive.

Deal support, deeper research, insight generation, and automated reporting, all inside the Microsoft suite. No new portals for GTM teams, just competitive intelligence where it’s actually needed.