Nathaniel Whittemore

What people mean when they use this term headless is software that does things without having a user interface.

Now, for a while, people have been talking about the idea that increasingly AI agents would be doing things on our behalf and that whatever combination of tools and searching and internet access that they need to get the job done that they're trying to do will inevitably be quite different from the type of interfaces that people would need to do the same things.

That creates a whole bunch of challenges and also a whole bunch of new opportunities.

Chief among the challenges is the fact that many different types of software providers are now going to have to support entirely different categories of quote-unquote users, as what their human users and their agentic users need will be fundamentally different.

Over the last week or so, we've gotten a set of announcements that all relate to this new headless paradigm and also give us a good sense of where enterprise agents are right now.

The first news that we're covering in this trend came about a week ago as Mark Benioff and Salesforce announced their new Headless 360 product.

Not burying the lead at all with that name, right?

Benioff tweets, Welcome Salesforce Headless 360.

No browser required.

Our API is the UI.

Entire Salesforce and AgentForce and Slack platforms are now exposed as APIs, MCP, and CLI.

All AI agents can access data, workflows, and tasks directly in Slack, Voice, or anywhere else with Salesforce Headless 360.

Faster builds, agentic everything.

So again, the whole concept here is the decoupling of agentic work from human interfaces.

Right, Salesforce?

For 25 years, using Salesforce meant working inside Salesforce.

A customer service rep opened a console, clicked into a case, and manually updated its status.

A human navigating a platform to get work done.

But in the agentic enterprise, humans aren't the only ones doing the navigating.

Agents are too, and they don't go to a browser or click through UIs.