SaaStr 875: Who Owns Your Data Now? Agents vs. System of Record, ServiceTitan vs. Podium, Headless Salesforce, and Agentic Renewals on The Agents #013

**Jason** (0:00)
Okay, everybody, welcome back to your favorite podcast, video cast, The Agents.
No one on the interwebs talks more about their 21 agents constantly. What we're learning from, what they do, the headaches, the learnings, than we do when we're back on The Agents. We'll talk about everything we've learned over the last week or so with them.
But I think one of the meta themes this year is when agents take over the system of record. Our agents have written about 40 gigabytes into Salesforce, Amelia talked more about it. 99% through the API. Neither of us have logged into Salesforce for a week. So who is the system of record actually for at this point?

**Amelia** (0:36)
Yeah, it's a good question. And also new this week, ServiceTitan just cut off podium over exactly this question. So while Salesforce is spending billions buying the agents, the storage math says your record is the most expensive database you own. So today, what moves out, what stays in, and what does it all cost?

**Jason** (0:54)
So I'm Jason here with Amelia, three humans, 20 plus agents.
Let's dig in. So first, usually we don't talk a lot about the news, although maybe we should more, but there's a meta issue.
And I wanted to use ServiceTitan and Podium, some of which you guys have probably never heard of either of these leaders, and then talk about what we've learned for B2B founders and executives, which is this system of record concept and what we've learned. And a lot of folks think that one of the islands of stability is being a system of record, an SAP, an Oracle, a Salesforce or a vertical system of record. ServiceTitan is the system of record for much of the services trade, for HVAC and much more. I think 1.5 billion ARR, we've had the CRO, the co-founders speak at SaaStr events, and it kind of dominated a lot of the trades. And the interesting question is, what is the moat for systems of record? What is a system of record? In fact, until recently at SaaStr, we basically had two and a half, three systems of record. We had Salesforce, we had Marketo, and we had Notion. We left two. So how safe are systems of record?
So I don't want to do too much of the news. I want to frame what I think happened with ServiceTitan, and then Amelia can kick it off and share what we've learned. But basically, again, ServiceTitan was one of the few B2B companies that have IPO'd in the last couple years. It was wildly successful to help you on your phone and otherwise manage your trade business. And for years, a startup called Podium, which is doing a couple hundred million in revenue, got them leads. Podium was a marketing lead generation solution. Eric Ray, the CEO, spoke at SaaStr Paris years ago. He may come back on the show and talk about it. And for years, they were partners. I have one piece of SaaS software that helps get you leads, and then it would drive it to one and a half billion AR ServiceTitan that would then close them, service them for years. And I don't know whether there's revenue sharing or whether Podium just made its own money, but that worked great. That worked great for years until ServiceTitan shut them off the other day. Shut them off after all these years with a thousand joint customers. And what happened? You know, the CEO of Podium went on the offensive. He was clear, listen, our agent, when Podium went, he became a gentic about a year and a half ago and crossed a hundred million of agent revenue. The agents for the same customers, for the same HVAC guys and other trades, the agent all of a sudden could do a lot more than get a lead. It could interact with the customers. It could schedule the meeting. It could track when the HVAC comes to fix your house.
And it could even share that record and become the system of record. Agents are much more powerful. So instead of discreet, the agent took over more and more and more of the space of ServiceTitan.
And ServiceTitan said, hold on, hold on. And actually, the CEO of Podium tore into ServiceTitan, but I think actually ServiceTitan's, at least public stands, is fairly mature. They issued an update to their API and partner, and they said, you actually can compete with us. You can access our records, but you can't steal our customers.

**Amelia** (4:03)
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