About a week ago at TrailblazerDX, Salesforce’s developer conference, Salesforce announced a headless architecture that puts agents in the driver’s seat of your applications and enables the way people interact with them.
After confirming this announcement, I was left with many questions. I also heard questions like these from my CIO friends: “Should CIOs rethink their approach to their current application stack?” Should purchasing plans include seat-based subscriptions? How is Salesforce looking to win and differentiate as applications become more data-based, consolidated by agents that automate tasks on behalf of humans? Prevent market intermediation In the world of open agents?
With these questions in mind, I reached out to senior leaders at Salesforce to speak directly. I was lucky enough to spend an hour talking with John Kucera, Senior Vice President of Product Management. John Kucera answered each question with incredible depth and clarity.
Transitioning from a system of record to an engagement system
Several years ago, author and venture capitalist Jeffrey Moore announced that enterprise software was moving from systems of record to systems of engagement—from applications that stored and processed data to applications that enabled interactions and experiences with that data. Moore clearly had a great crystal ball, but agent AI is changing things even more.
My first question was on behalf of my son James, who is a sales manager. “Is Salesforce’s graphical user interface going away?”
Kucera responded that there will always be some form of graphical UI. However, he added, “We believe we are entering an agent-first world,” and as such, “we will continue to drive agent-centric experiences.”
Differentiate yourself in a mindless world
Kucera positioned Salesforce’s open approach as a continuation of that tradition, rather than a departure. “We have always been open, and we will continue to be open. It’s powerful to be that way. Salesforce is the number one API out there. We discovered this when we acquired MuleSoft.” Having worked at Boomi, I can see how central the connection to Salesforce is as an API.
Asked if Salesforce is in danger of becoming just middleware or just a system of record, Kucera demurred. Sure, Salesforce is a great system of record, but it’s much more than that. He hinted that as long as Salesforce remains open in the way it operates, Salesforce’s domain knowledge will continue to be a differentiator in the agent world. “We are evolving this way because we are a customer company and our customers want the choice and openness that we provide.”
At that point, he blurted out a line I’ve heard from other vendors defending their core franchises. “It’s hard to vibecode our core assets,” he continued, “and it’s going to be hard to do as well as an agent.” Let’s take a look.
How CIOs are rethinking their application stacks
Many CIOs are delaying extending multi-year SaaS contracts, and some are moving to one-year contracts. With this in mind, I asked if this would change the way we manage our application portfolios. Kucera didn’t shy away from questions and acknowledged that change has already begun. As agents take on more work, the traditional per-seat subscription model becomes less relevant. In response, he said Salesforce is rethinking how it prices and monetizes its products.
He emphasized the need for flexibility. While the transition is clearly coming, Kucera suggested it may not be as disruptive as the previous license-to-subscription transition. That said, the company acknowledged the risk of short-term revenue pressure during the transition. For now, his guidance for CIOs is pragmatic and to continue purchasing subscriptions while the market evolves.
How will the operationalization of agents impact work?
Kucera makes it clear that the human transition is already underway. In core CRM areas such as support, jobs are shifting upwards. Humans move from Tier 1 to Tier 2 to Tier 3, and agents take on more front-line activities. He also argues that agencies are starting to restructure the sales process itself. With that in mind, I asked him what his future plans would be. His framework is a transition from steps to tasks to processes and ultimately to broader business functions.
He said: Early generative AI use cases focused on automating individual steps, simple actions that many people perform using LLM. That quickly evolved into tasks like retrieving pricing data and resetting passwords. The current focus is on processes, or multi-step, multi-person workflows, such as mortgages and insurance claims. The next step, he said, is coordinating multiple processes into larger domain-level functions. This is what McKinsey describes as: Rewire version 2 — And that should be scary for a company like Appian.
Salesforce has long been a leader in low-code platforms, but Kucera believes the company is ready to move into these larger process areas. He describes himself as a “process person” and sees this as a natural evolution. Today, processes are often framed as either customer-centric or employee-centric, but the real opportunity lies in aligning the entire process.
An obvious question arises here. Will Salesforce scale to cross-cutting, end-to-end processes like order-to-cash? Traditional ERP boundaries Are SAP and Oracle dominating? Kucera’s answer is a straightforward “yes.”
with them MCP [Model Context protocol] server He believes this approach addresses the challenges between these systems and empowers customers to take action across systems, not just within them.
What about human AI and open AI?
When asked if Salesforce was worried about Anthropic and OpenAI, Kucera was confident.
“For us, Anthropic means a lot of things: a customer, a partner, a backer, a hosted solution, and certainly, in some cases, a competitor,” he said. But he was reluctant to predict further than a few years ahead.
So how does Salesforce plan to win as applications increasingly become databases run by agents that automate tasks on behalf of humans? Kucera emphasized that one size does not fit all and that openness to the broader ecosystem is essential.
He cited Agentforce’s early traction as a reason not to worry about the issue of market disintermediation, at least for now. But he was candid and delivered something of a Doc Brown moment. back to the future: It doesn’t say how the software will change or change in the future.
He said that vibecoding alone cannot rebuild enterprise software, and emphasized that it is still early days. From there, he leant toward his current position at Salesforce. Agentforce has already moved beyond pilot and is the fastest growing product platform in Salesforce history, he said.
“We win by continuing to disrupt ourselves. To win, we have to innovate faster and deploy to more customers.” He says the advantage lies in being enterprise-grade, successfully deploying at scale, and helping managers transition to agent managers. This, he believes, is a fundamental capability for building what he calls truly agentic enterprises.
What does this mean for CIOs?
CIOs are right to be wary. Salesforce, like many vendors, is in the midst of a significant transition. To its credit, the company is disrupting its proprietary model and moving toward the openness that the market increasingly expects. At the same time, trends like “vibe coding” are unlikely to replace the core code and architecture that underpins that franchise.
The open question is what this means for Salesforce’s long-term position. as rita mcgrath He argues that companies at inflection points need to “see around the corner.” Salesforce appears to be doing just that. But capital markets have reason to be cautious. As McGrath points out, digital technologies have the potential to fundamentally reshape the way value chains are structured and managed.
This creates a paradox. Salesforce can do well with agents, openness, and new pricing models, but it still finds its role within the ecosystem changing as the rules of the game change. It’s still too early to call. We expect this to be an evolving story worth paying close attention to in the coming months.
