The next platform shift will not be won where users click
The next platform shift will not be won where users click, it will be won where agents connect.
Most people do not “work in Salesforce.” They work in email, messaging, ticketing, and spreadsheets, and Salesforce quietly becomes a system of record that gets updated as a side effect. When an agent can read, write, reconcile, and trigger workflows safely, the UI stops being the product and becomes a fallback.
This is why buying behavior is changing. Teams will evaluate software the way integrators used to: how clean is the API, how predictable are the permissions, how fast are the webhooks, how painful are rate limits, how observable are failures. Automating collections is a good example. The hard part is not a dashboard. It is reliably pulling invoices, matching payments, handling exceptions, and leaving an auditable trail when the agent acts.
Incumbent SaaS moats weaken here because their strength was trained users and sticky interfaces. Agent-first workflows shift power to the layer that composes systems quickly and safely.
This is what companies like Stripe, Twilio, and Snowflake understood early. In the agent era, “API quality” becomes the distribution channel.