Nathaniel Whittemore

Even before ChatGPT, there was a lot of consternation around this between these SaaS providers and their customers.

In the wake of ChatGPT and the beginning of more advanced generative AI, you saw many companies start to try to at least experiment with outcome-based pricing or just non-seat-based models, but their users were still primarily human and nothing really quite stuck.

What's different about this time is that you actually have a different category of user, where I think different types of natural business models, like these consumption-based models or whatever we figure out works, actually fall naturally out of the new user behavior pattern.

One of the big speculative debates people are having is who captures this new type of value.

Is it horizontal providers like OpenAI and Anthropic?

The old systems of record like Salesforce?

Vertical agents that deal with specific functions and use cases?

And there are debates on all sides of this.

Simon Smith writes, yes, value is shifting from UI to agents and the data and infrastructure to support them, but it's not clear to me that vertically specific Salesforce is best positioned to capture the shifting value.

The AI labs are building vertical agnostic agent infrastructure, and there are many capable data and infrastructure providers in the market already.

Akash Gupta provides the counter-argument.

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.