It has been a February. Paris, Copenhagen, Berlin, Stockholm, four cities, four different offices, and very nearly the same conversation in each. How do you get from AI curiosity to structured adoption, and who inside the office is actually meant to own that shift? Wherever we went, that question was already in the room before we arrived.
One idea from Techarena's Family Office Days has not left me since. What is happening in coding may be the canary in the coalmine. If AI is already rewriting how software gets built, the profession that arguably understood computers best, what does that say about the softer, messier workflows a family office runs on? Worth sitting with, uncomfortably.
The canary in the codebase
First, OpenClaw. An open-source AI agent built by the Austrian developer Peter Steinberger went from weekend side project to more than 60,000 GitHub stars almost overnight, and by mid-February its creator had been hired by OpenAI to work on the next generation of personal agents. The idea underneath it, an always-on assistant acting across your email, calendar and messages, is one we have been quietly testing for over two years. My honest read is that it is not ready to leave the lab yet. But it is a clean demonstration of what a hype wave can do the moment the technology underneath it finally catches up.
800 billion in a week
Then the SaaSpocalypse, as the traders started calling it, and for once the drama was earned. More than 800 billion dollars of market value came off software stocks in a single week. Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow, even SAP and Thomson Reuters took the hit. The fear is that AI agents break the per-seat subscription model the industry has run on for twenty years. The irony, and there is always one, is that several of the names being dumped are among the best placed to win in an AI-native world. Markets tend to overshoot in both directions before they settle.
The bloodbath memo
The signal that mattered most came from Anthropic's Dario Amodei, who warned that half of entry-level white-collar jobs could be disrupted inside one to five years. Law, finance, consulting: most knowledge work sits squarely in the path of what he called a white-collar bloodbath. Quite a sentence, coming from the person building the technology driving it. You do not get many warnings this candid from inside the tent.
When the auditor audits itself
And a small, telling confirmation of the whole thesis. KPMG, one of the largest auditors on earth, pushed its own accountant, Grant Thornton, for a 14% fee cut, on the argument that AI should make audit faster and cheaper. When a Big Four firm starts using AI to squeeze its own costs, the rest of professional services should probably stop watching and start reading the memo.
Upcoming: the Copenhagen Gathering
We are pouring all of this into our half-day gathering in Copenhagen on 18 March, bringing family offices together with a genuinely strong bench: Mette Kaagaard (CEO, Microsoft Denmark & Iceland) on AI innovation to infrastructure, Jeppe Christiansen (CEO, Maj Invest) on the future of investment in AI, Louis Wolff-Petersen (Atlas People) on people decisions under AI, Bjarke Mikkelsen and Anders Frich Mathiesen on AI infrastructure as an asset class, Rene Thornfeldt (Accura) on AI and legal governance, and Nicolas Arroyo (Bespoke) on foresight in investment strategy. We are at capacity but opening a little more space given demand, so reply if you would like in.