As an AI Coach, Advisor, and Agent Builder, I help organizations and business leaders harness the power of artificial intelligence to boost productivity and streamline operations. I enable organizations to navigate the transformative landscape of AI, educating teams, identifying operational and strategic opportunities with AI and creating a framework for safe and transparent use of data in the organization.
Salesforce went headless. Make sure your vendors are next.
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In the last two weeks, I have had four separate conversations client who had the same bottleneck. They wanted data out of their CRM. Out of their lender database. Out of their portfolio company reporting tools. Not to migrate. Not to rip and replace. Just to let an agent read the data, summarize it, route it, act on it. In every case, the answer was the same: call your vendor. Hope they have an API. Hope it covers what you need. Hope they will let you use it. That hope is the new procurement question. Twelve months ago, software buyers asked about features and pricing. Today, the buyers I work with are asking a different question before they sign anything: can my agent talk to your platform, or do my people have to keep logging in? Then, two weeks ago, Salesforce answered that question for the entire industry. On April 15, at their developer conference, they announced Headless 360. Every capability in the platform, including data, workflows, business logic, is now exposed as an API, an MCP tool, or a CLI command. Co-founder Parker Harris asked it out loud: "Why should you ever log into Salesforce again?" For a company whose entire 25-year identity has been the browser-based interface, this is a complete teardown. The UI is no longer how work gets done. Agents call the platform directly, from Slack, from Claude, from voice, from anywhere. Why now? Look at the stock. Salesforce is down 31% year to date in 2026, while the S&P is down about 5%. Investors are punishing the model. The fear is that AI agents make the seat license obsolete, and that a startup with a clean API and no legacy UI can eat the workflow before Salesforce can defend it. Headless 360 is what defending looks like. The lesson is not really about Salesforce. Salesforce is the proof point. They are the largest, oldest, most entrenched UI-first software company in the world, and they just rebuilt themselves around the assumption that humans are not the primary user anymore. If they are doing it, every vendor in your stack is going to have to do it. Some will. Some will not. The ones who do not will be replaced, not by a competitor with a better UI, but by one that does not need a UI at all. Somewhere right now, a team of 3 entrepreneurs with a fresh codebase is building the headless version of a product you currently pay for. The buyer who asked that procurement question will find them. A question worth asking your team this week: Which of our current vendors expose their full functionality through an API or MCP server today? If the answer is "we don't know," make sure you ask your vendor soon. It's the most critical part of the insight and productivity unlock that comes from agents. Alex |
Alex Talks AI
As an AI Coach, Advisor, and Agent Builder, I help organizations and business leaders harness the power of artificial intelligence to boost productivity and streamline operations. I enable organizations to navigate the transformative landscape of AI, educating teams, identifying operational and strategic opportunities with AI and creating a framework for safe and transparent use of data in the organization.
I spent last week building an investment deck for a client. The raw material was a pile of research reports. The output needed to be a branded PowerPoint that looked like it came from inside their firm, not from a random consultant with a Canva account. If you've ever tried to get an LLM to spit out a polished, branded deck, you know how this usually goes. The content is fine. The formatting is a disaster. Here's what I tried. Attempt 1. I worked in Claude, pointed it at the folder of...
Their names are Aaron Sorkin, Andy Sachs, Hemingway, Darwin, Ted Lasso, and Archivist. They're agents I built inside Claude. Each one has a role, a personality, a set of files they own, and a clear job. Aaron Sorkin is my chief of staff. He directs everything. When I throw something into the void at 11pm, he decides whether it's an Andy problem, a Hemingway problem, or something I actually need to handle myself. Andy Sachs runs operations. She tracks my Notion CRM, drafts invoices, watches my...
You ask for research. You get a confident-sounding wall of text. The numbers feel right. The framing is fine. But you cannot quite tell where any of it came from, and you would not bet a client meeting on it. I had that feeling one too many times this month, so I ran a small experiment. Same research brief, different tools. The question: what is it actually like to work at SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla? I wanted real numbers from Glassdoor, Indeed, and Blind. Ratings, work-life balance, culture,...