Nathaniel Whittemore

Your Salesforce data can be leveraged 100x more to do vastly more customer targeting and sales automation.

Your documents can be turned into structured data and analyzed for insights and knowledge to automate other workflows, and so on.

Now, of course, you have to find a way to make this all commercially attractive, but it's not hard to picture the revenue from API and agent consumption on these platforms becoming a rich component of revenue streams over time.

Seats for the people, consumption for the agents.

Lots of upside here for the companies that embrace this trend.

Now, many others jumped on the business model implications here.

Vibe marketer JB writes, Salesforce going headless is bigger than people realize.

Software has been priced per seat for decades.

The entire business model assumes a person logs in, clicks around and gets value from a dashboard.

Agents don't log in.

They make API calls.

So what happens to per seat pricing when the primary user of your platform isn't a person?

When one company runs 50 agents that each make more API calls in a day than the entire sales team makes in a month.

Every SaaS company is about to face this question.

Salesforce just forced it into the open by going fully headless.

The ones that figure out agent-native pricing first will own the next cycle.

The ones still charging per seat while agents do the work will get left behind.

Now, interestingly, this idea that the per-seat model was on its last legs has been around for the last few years.

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.