How CEOs are answering the dreaded LLM disruption question

Large language models (LLMs) have taken over Wall Street and most companies have to answer questions about AI opportunities and disruptions.

Not surprisingly, these LLM concerns first emerged with the death-of-SaaS chatter as if we were all going to vibe code enterprise systems without governance. Then, the roving LLM concerns moved to financial services, media and hotels with other industries on deck. 

With that backdrop in mind, it's worth compiling a few excerpts on how CEOs are answering the inevitable questions about LLMs, Anthropic, OpenAI and how these businesses are allegedly toast. These comments were made in recent days on earnings calls.

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HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan: SaaS isn't just data. It's the logic.

Rangan said: 

"In terms of disruption, there's a big difference between point SaaS solutions and platform. And that difference matters even more in the AI era. Look, in the last decade, HubSpot won as a platform because we were the source for customer data. With AI, we will win because we are the source of customer content, and that matters. As I talk to customers right now, the biggest challenge we see with AI adoption, particularly in mid-market companies is not access to more AI tools, more LLMs, more agents. There are plenty of those.

The biggest challenge that I see is that there is a huge gap between AI output and AI outcomes. And when I say outcomes, I mean more leads, more deals, more growth. And by the way, that's all our customers want to talk to us about. Mid-market companies don't care about AI for the sake of AI. They don't want to just adopt it. They care about driving growth. And if AI can help with that, they will adopt it. And in order for AI and agents to drive outcomes, you need customer content. This is the context that was in the heads of people, but now you need the patterns of what works, what doesn't work in your business, in your industry, in your particular function, and then you need to be able to take an action on it. And that is what a platform like HubSpot delivers." 

"I'll give you a practical example. You can ask an LLM to generate outreach for 100 prospects. And then do the same thing in the platform with a history of interactions with the prioritization of what sales cares about with how your best reps handle competitive objections within your industry and then ask it to generate outreach.

The difference is one will be AI output and the other will be AI outcomes. One produces words, the other wins deals. One knows a lot about the external world. The platform knows specifically about the customers' world and what is happening today. There is this whole idea that AI is like a magic wand and you can subtract away all of this problem and expect agents to work. It just will not. Content has to come from somewhere. It has to be trusted. It needs to be real time, and it needs to be actionable." 

Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb:  Platforms matter

Chesky said:

"A chatbot doesn't have our 200 million verified identities or our 500 million proprietary reviews, and it can't message the host, which 90% of our guests do. It can't provide global payment processing, customer support or insurance. By layering AI over the entire Airbnb experience, we believe we're building something that's impossible to replicate. So, you can see why we're so excited about the year ahead and our guidance reflects that. We expect revenue growth to accelerate to at least low double digits in 2026. We expect adjusted EBITDA margins to be stable year-over-year. And we'll do all of this without investing billions or tens of billions of dollars. We don't need massive capital investment to grow. We don't own homes. We don't operate experiences, and we're not building data centers. What we're doing is finding small wins and scaling them profitably."

Later in the earnings call, Chesky said:

"The vast majority of what is Airbnb is not the app that you see. First of all, we have a whole host app, which is really critical, and we've built this over 18 years. We handle more than $100 billion in payments through the platform. Customer service is one of the most difficult problems in Airbnb. We don't have SKUs. People -- we need to adjudicate between people speaking different languages. We provide insurance and protection for everyone. We do a lot of verification. 90% of people who book on Airbnb send a message. You can't send a message without verified ID. We have 200 million verified IDs, which is more than U.S. passports in circulation.

The vast majority of our homes and our unique inventory is only on Airbnb. We're adding more offerings over time, and we think people are going to want to put them together into an itinerary that they could bring on in their phone with them when they're traveling. I think these chatbot platforms are going to be very similar to search. They're going to be really good top-of-funnel discoveries. And in fact, what we've seen is I think they're going to be positive for Airbnb."

Chesky noted that first party data matters.

"The other thing to know, and this is the most important point, is that these models are not proprietary. The models in ChatGPT, the models in Gemini, the models in Claude and the models like Kiwi are available to every single company. And so pretty soon, every company becomes an AI platform if they make the shift," he said. 

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman: LLMs aren't local

Stoppelman said:

"We are further extending our reach to power local discovery across the AI ecosystem. As search evolves towards AI, we believe the value of our first-party data, including 330 million reviews, nearly 500 million photos and more than 8 million business listings is becoming increasingly clear. In 2025, we saw strong demand for our data licensing products, and we recently signed an agreement with OpenAI. We believe we are well positioned to be the essential partner providing trusted local content and enabling actions whenever consumers are making local decisions."

Keep in mind that Yelp is competing with Google for local businesses. Stoppelman said: 

"Yelp has really great content, millions of human written reviews, really critical content, critical information. If you want to deliver an experience, a general search experience, eventually, those consumers are going to be asking questions with local intent. That's historically with Google has reported that something like 50% of queries on traditional search have local intent.

And if you're trying to compete with Google, like many of these folks are, you really need that high-quality content and Yelp has it."

Roku CEO Anthony Wood: AI as opportunity

Wood said:

"I think AI is a significant opportunity for Roku. We view it as a powerful tailwind to our business.

It's not a disruptor for us, and we're integrating it across our entire technology stack. We're applying AI across our platform to improve discovery, increase engagement and unlock major new monetization opportunities. So let me just talk about a few of those. On the viewer experience, AI helps personalize and simplify how people find what to watch, which increases engagement. For example, on our content row, we're improving recommendations and introducing new features that surface trending content. On our content details page, we're using AI to generate why to-watch summaries that go beyond just plot overviews. We've updated Roku Voice recently. Now viewers can ask more conversational entertainment-based questions and get contextual answers directly on their TV screen. So that's just some examples in the viewer experience. But I would say also equally important for us is on the advertising side, if not more important.

AI is a major driver of opportunity in the advertising side of our business. AI helps us build the most performant connected TV ad platform. AI is opening the entire new market of small- and medium-sized businesses, which we're addressing with Ads Manager. I mean that's an entire new segment in the ad business that was not accessible to TV platforms before but is now because of AI."

Pinterest CEO William Ready: Visual data a differentiator

Ready said:

"I want to begin where every platform starts with users and engagement. It's clear that we are in a period of rapid innovation in our industry with new AI chatbots quickly scaling to hundreds of millions of users. However, competing for user engagement is not new to us, and we have been able to thrive because we are doing something separate and distinct.

As AI adoption accelerates, general purpose search is increasingly up for grabs as the largest players pour capital into general purpose LLMs. But fit-for-purpose search still wins in key verticals like travel and consumer products. Our differentiation is clear. We're using AI to power visual search, discovery and shopping, not general-purpose text-based search. Pinterest sees over 80 billion searches a month and the vast majority are visual, while our newest visual search features are growing fastest.

Engagement is growing because our unique curation signal and taste graph, combined with cutting-edge AI has improved relevance significantly and made our surfaces much more actionable."

Angi CEO Jeffrey Kip: Engaged customers win

Kip said:

"We've been very successful building an acquisition on Google, which is effectively the predecessor of the LLMs. Google obviously has its own LLM, where homeowners and customers go to explore research and discover. We've been very effective because we have built a network, a deep, broad and skilled network, which Google still finds very useful as a partner to serve its customers, and we believe the LLMs will as well.

We have started working actively working with every LLM. We have had conversations and are an effective dialogue. We've announced the deal with Amazon's Alexa. We have an app submitted to another major LLM. We're talking live about two technical integrations based on the same technology we built for the app we submitted. And we feel very good about the opportunity there. We think that it's harder for LLMs to go out and build the deep and engaged customer base that we have."