Robert F. Smith says Agentic AI unlocks profitability

Robert F. Smith, the founder and chief executive of Vista Equity Partners and one of the wealthiest Black Americans alive, went on CNBC Monday and made a direct argument: the next phase of the AI boom is not in the publicly traded hyperscalers most investors are watching. It is inside private enterprise software companies, and it is already happening inside his own portfolio.

“Agentic AI software are creating massive unlock in profitability,” Smith told CNBC’s Closing Bell, describing how Vista’s portfolio companies are deploying autonomous AI agents to perform complex business tasks with a level of precision that consumer AI tools cannot match.

Vista Equity Partners manages approximately $100 billion in assets across more than 90 portfolio companies specializing in enterprise software. Smith said 30 of those companies are already generating revenue from converting to agentic AI. Another 30 to 40 will complete the transition in the coming months.

The productivity numbers Smith cited are specific. Portfolio companies are seeing 30% to 50% gains in the speed and efficiency of writing code. Some tasks that previously took a human employee hours to complete can now be done in seconds by AI agents. He put the economics of inference plainly: 20 cents’ worth of AI compute can lead to up to $10 in cost savings.

Vista’s approach to this transition is systematic. The firm built what it calls an “Agentic Factory,” an internal infrastructure deployed across the portfolio to convert companies from conventional software tools to AI agent systems. Smith said the infrastructure was assembled over two and a half years working with hyperscaler partners who provide capacity and technological capability. The Factory is not a concept. It is operational, and Smith said it is already generating measurable results.

His broader market thesis challenges the assumption that AI will weaken enterprise software. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang famously predicted in 2017 that AI would “eat software.” Smith argues the opposite in the enterprise context. “AI will enable enterprise software to eat services,” he said. As agents take on tasks previously handled by human service providers, the economic rent captured by the software platforms running those agents grows significantly.

The companies best positioned to succeed, in Smith’s framing, are those with proprietary data and workflow context that cannot be replicated by competitors or by general-purpose models. That structural advantage allows them to build high-precision, domain-specific agents — and in banking, insurance and regulated industries where accuracy demands are absolute, that precision is the entire value proposition.

Smith’s investment thesis for 2026 positions Vista at the centre of a trade that most public market investors are missing. “AI has sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the air for a lot of investors and pulled them into the Mag 7,” he said, referring to the large-cap technology companies dominating public AI infrastructure investment. “Those hyperscalers are now starting to build out the infrastructure and capability. But the next wave will be the application providers. And that’s typically been the way these cycles have played out.”

Smith’s personal net worth stands at approximately $11.1 billion, built primarily through his stake in Vista. He founded the firm in 2000 with $1 billion from investor Robert Agee and has grown it from a $3.5 billion fund in 2012 into one of the largest private equity operations focused on software globally.