Nathaniel Whittemore

He says, The math for mid-tier SaaS is brutal.

Once the agent layer works across tools, enterprise buyers stop paying $30 a seat for AI in five different products when one chat GPT seat runs the same workflow.

The real winner, he continues, is whoever owns the data access layer.

Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday sit on the schemas every agent has to read from.

They just became the toll road.

And yet others are seeing this shift to headless as an opportunity for more, not less, usage of the existing platforms.

Matthew Kobach writes, SaaS has taken a beating in the public markets lately as a response to AI.

There's an interesting counterposition that headless SaaS becomes more valuable with AI, not less.

Software has a learning curve and a human bottleneck.

But if I could have a dozen capable agents working inside any given software, that software becomes more valuable, not less.

So one argument for why the SaaSpocalypse won't play out exactly as investors have thought is that reducing the friction in agents using tools means that agents will use more tools.

Seat price might go down, but consumption will go up, and there's actually room to make even more money.

The other thing that some are thinking about, though, is that some of the SaaS tools that are used for human coordination today might be naturally positioned for agent coordination tomorrow.

Ivan Burazin, for example, writes, "'Atlassian' is still undervalued.

Everyone thinks Jira and Confluence will get vibe-coded away.

Instead, they'll build headless versions, API first, same product, no UI, for agents.

Agents need standardized project management just like humans do.

Stock is underperforming because people misunderstand what's happening."

Ivan has actually been thinking a lot about this shift to headless software.

In another tweet from back at the end of March, he wrote, agents need headless tools to work efficiently.