Vista Equity Partners’ Founder, Chairman and CEO Robert Smith sat down with CNBC’s Robert Frank for an in-depth conversation on the future of artificial intelligence and investing in enterprise software.

In this exclusive interview, Robert Smith explains why he believes the next major AI opportunity will be in applications, not infrastructure. As AI hardware and large language models become commoditized, the greatest economic value will come from applying AI inside enterprise workflows to automate tasks, increase productivity and expand margins. Because the vast majority of enterprise application software companies are private, private markets will play a central role in the next phase of AI investing.

Robert Smith also shares how Vista Equity Partners is scaling this transformation through its Agentic Factory, a platform designed to help portfolio companies build high-precision agentic AI products that operate inside mission-critical workflows.