Closing Bell 10/13/26

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are, with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters, so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward.

The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones, Member SIPC.

SPEAKER_2 (0:30)

Some of the most important design choices are the ones that go unnoticed. The details that together make an experience feel intuitive, comfortable and, above all, exhilarating. At Acura, that means looking closely at how every detail could make your experience behind the wheel more rewarding. Every lesson learned and every idea refined becomes part of what comes next, and it lives inside every MDX, ADX and Integra. That's precision-crafted performance. That's Acura.

Scott Wapner (0:56)

All right, guys, thanks so much.

SPEAKER_4 (0:57)

Welcome to Closing Bell.

Scott Wapner (0:58)

I'm Scott Wapner, live from the CAIS Alternative Investment Summit in Beverly Hills. Let's show you the scorecard here as the last hour of trading gets underway. As you know, we've been mostly lower for the afternoon. It is the day that financials report earnings. We're following that. We're watching interest rates. We're watching everything, and like it is almost everywhere else, AI is the topic of conversation, both in credit opportunities around the infrastructure build out and what's been happening in the enterprise software arena. On that note, our headliner is one of the world's foremost software investors. He is Robert Smith. He is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, and he is, as you see, live with us once again. It's nice to see you.

SPEAKER_5 (1:39)

Thank you for taking the time.

Robert Smith (1:41)

It's a pleasure.

Scott Wapner (1:41)

I feel like when we spoke last year, it was peak software is dead. Everybody has been talking about that. The IGV is up 50 percent off its load. Do you think we've gotten better at identifying the winners and the losers and how the winners are actually going to win?

Robert Smith (2:00)

I'm not sure that we've gotten better, but I think it's become more clear that there will be winners and losers. And those winners will have invoked a process to show investors how they're going to utilize AI to not only, in our case, from an enterprise perspective, deliver solutions to their customers, but solutions that they can rely on. You know, the enterprise world, very different than the consumer world, we focus on governance, guardrails, trust, security. And you have to build systems that are reliable. We call it operational intelligence for our customers, through our portfolio companies. That is what I think investors are now starting to see. There's going to be a differentiation, as in the marketplace, from systemic, call it enterprise class systems versus consumer systems.

Scott Wapner (2:48)

You mentioned the difference between consumer and the enterprise. It feels like most of the conversation these days is around the consumer. Right? Muse comes out, and we're talking about that, and everybody's checking it out, and meta stock goes up.

Why so? Why are we fixated on the consumer side right now?

Robert Smith (3:04)

A big part, of course, as consumers, we have given away our data for a decade plus to these platforms that they now use and use AI to make our lives more productive as individuals. But if you really look at the companies that are bringing the infrastructure, they are relying on the enterprise that actually drive value. And enterprises aren't going to just adopt systems, what I'll call willy-nilly in early stage. They're looking for trusted vendors who actually can deliver to them systems that actually have governance procedures around them on guardrails in a way that is not going to pollute or damage the intellectual property of their businesses.

Satya Nadella has been talking about this, Alex has been very vocal about it, I've been talking about it. You need to bring these models to your data, not your data to the models.

Scott Wapner (3:50)

You like saying that, that's one of your key sayings.

Robert Smith (3:53)

Right, and it's important to do that because if you do that in an environment, you can preserve intellectual property, you can utilize the capacity and capability of this artificial intelligence capability and not leak enterprise value into some third party system that you don't own and you do actually have to buy, I call it, your inference tokens from.

Scott Wapner (4:12)

I'm kind of surprised to hear you say that you don't think we've gotten better in being able to identify the winners from the losers and how the winners are going to win. I mean, the business model is obviously changing for enterprise software from per seat to usage or outcome.