01. Customer support platforms — threat 94/100
Why it's exposed: AI agents already resolve 60–80% of tier-1 tickets in published deployments. Seat-based pricing collapses when one workflow replaces fifty agents.
What the desk watches: NRR trajectory, seat-count disclosures, customer 'agent ops' job postings.
02. Outsourced IT & BPO — threat 90/100
Why it's exposed: The entire model bills humans by the hour for work models do in seconds. Headcount-linked revenue is the most direct displacement exposure on the board.
What the desk watches: Contract TCV trends, client AI pilots, attrition in delivery headcount.
03. Legal research & discovery — threat 88/100
Why it's exposed: Frontier models pass the bar and read a million pages before lunch. Paywalled-database moats erode as firms route work through general-purpose AI.
What the desk watches: Per-query pricing pressure, AmLaw firm AI hires, contract non-renewals.
04. Stock content & creative tooling — threat 86/100
Why it's exposed: Generation costs collapsed to near zero; native-AI competitors price at a twentieth of incumbents. Take-rates and royalty pools shrink together.
What the desk watches: Contributor payout trends, library licensing terms, take-rate disclosures.
05. HR & recruiting software — threat 81/100
Why it's exposed: Screening, scheduling and sourcing were the seats. Recruiter headcount falls first; licenses follow at renewal.
What the desk watches: Customer recruiter-headcount trends, usage-based pricing pivots.
06. Mid-market CRM & sales tools — threat 76/100
Why it's exposed: Agentic outreach and pipeline management erode per-rep licensing, while switching costs hold the enterprise tier longer than the mid-market.
What the desk watches: Mid-market churn vs enterprise, rep-productivity tool consolidation.
The mechanism behind every entry on this list — seats, NRR, multiple compression — is laid out in the thesis. How shorts are actually structured against these sectors is in the playbook. Fresh evidence lands daily in The Daily Short.