Is Software Losing Its Head?

**Seema Amble** (0:00)
There are many things that made software sticky, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that it was built around the way a human interacts. In an agendic world, do you actually need that? The data, the logic, everything stored below it is really where the value is.

**Steven Sinofsky** (0:15)
There's this wild underestimation about you could drive code your way into enterprise software.
Larry Ellison at Oracle, he went on a rant about how enterprise software was so stupid because everybody customized it. The minute you automate the most mundane thing and think you have it all squared away, whole new things appear.

**Seema Amble** (0:34)
Misconception right now is that you can just have Postgres database and APIs and then bam, you can replace SAP. That's absolutely not true. That piece around the logic and everything else that is in captured in SAP is way more important than the fact that this data just happens to be in this database.

**Steven Sinofsky** (0:54)
One of the things that happens in technology shifts is nobody understands the exponential when it's happening. The biggest opportunity right now is...

**Elena Burger** (1:02)
For decades, enterprise software has been built around one assumption. Humans are the primary users. But what happens when AI agents become the ones reading data, updating records and completing workflows? That shift raises a much bigger question than whether software gets a new interface. It challenges how enterprise software is built, where value lives and what makes platforms like Salesforce and SAP so difficult to replace.
In this episode, Seema Amble, Steven Sinofsky and Elena Burger discuss headless software, AI agents, enterprise architecture and why the next generation of software may look very different from the SaaS products we've used for the last 20 years.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:45)
Welcome to the a16z podcast. I'm here with Seema Amble, a partner here on the enterprise team, and Steven Sinofsky, who is a board partner at a16z, as well as a former member of Microsoft, a friend of the firm. And here we are today to talk about a piece that Seema wrote about a month ago called, Is Software Losing Its Head? And I'll let Seema talk about it in her own words. But this piece was written a couple months ago, Salesforce announced that they would be going headless. And today we're here to kind of discuss what does that mean? What does that mean for the future of SaaS products, the future of kind of software more generally? So Seema, can you just walk me through first what headless software means and explain kind of what changes it introduces?

**Seema Amble** (2:40)
Yeah, so headless software is not a new term, but I think has really risen in the public domain of interest in a topic that people are talking about.
One of the interesting news points has been Salesforce making this announcement, they were launching Headless 360, which was really in classic Salesforce motion history, a marketing announcement more than anything else. But it does capture, it's an acknowledgement of what's happening, which is traditional software had been built around humans accessing it, and it was workflow to capture data, and we could talk more about what that meant. In an agenda world, do you actually need that? The UI doesn't matter because the agent isn't accessing the software via the UI. We can unpack whether the UI matters or not, but in the idea of it being Headless is the data, the logic, everything stored below it is really where the value is, not just the workflow software that's being tracked at the top.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:32)
And this was announced a couple months ago. I'm curious, in the past couple months, what have we seen? I mean, you wrote, even in the piece, kind of at the beginning, you were a little bit funny, maybe. And you said, is this really even that big of an announcement? Is this sort of a rebrand of APIs that they had kind of already made available? So does this feel like a significant change? Is this maybe more of a branding exercise? And kind of like, what have we even seen in the past couple months since we've been able to kind of observe what changes have really happened?

**Seema Amble** (4:04)
So I'll separate it out into the Salesforce context and then the broader context. I think the broader context is more interesting. In the Salesforce context, probably not that interesting. I think Salesforce, I think rightfully, again, it was acknowledging a shift that's happening in the market. From what I could tell, nothing actually changed. Their 360 product was same APIs that had always been exposed, now rebranded as their 360 product. And APIs have always existed. I should say always, but for a long time, it existed. But I think the broader trend here is Salesforce, among others, are thinking about how they build themselves for the agent of world. And so if an agent needs to access the data in a CRM, like Salesforce, what are they doing? Are they doing it via the UI or the API? And that's the Salesforce is saying, okay, hey, we know what is changing, that there are agents who are needing to access the data. Let's offer a headless version for them to interact with the data versus going via the UI. That said, again, I don't think any actually changed in the Salesforce context, but Salesforce is the old one. Another example is Notion has a headless product. And actually I think that makes even more sense because it's much harder. I think many users of Salesforce are probably less technically adept, less likely to be building their own agents. Although there are many, many more people who are doing that with Salesforce. Notion users, all things being equal, are more, I'd say, tech savvy and more agentic as builders. I think Notion is one of many other companies that is also trying to figure out, okay, what is it that I offer and what APIs do I expose? I think Steven will talk more about MCP. Again, I think a lot of this is also getting caught up a little bit in nomenclature and like, okay, what are we calling things?