“Why put them all into Salesforce?” Rao asks. “If the idea is to do and monitor the sale, it doesn’t have to go into Salesforce, and the agents can go grab it.”
When Rao was a consultant having a conversation with a client, he’d log it into Salesforce with a note, for instance, saying the client needs a white paper from the partner in charge of quantum.
With an agent taking notes during the meeting, it can immediately identify the action items and follow up to get the white paper.
“Right now we’re blindly automating the existing workflow,” Rao says. “But why do we need to do that? There’ll be a fundamental shift of how we see value chains and systems. We’ll get rid of all the intermediate steps. That’s the biggest worry for the SAPs, Salesforces, and Workdays of the world.”
Another aspect of the agentic economy is instead of a human employee talking to a vendor’s AI agent, a company agent can handle the conversation on the employee’s behalf. And if a company wants to switch vendors, the experience will be seamless for employees, since they never had to deal directly with the vendor anyway.
“I think that’s something that’ll happen,” says Ricardo Baeza-Yates, co-chair of the US technology policy committee at the Association for Computing Machinery. “And it makes the market more competitive, and makes integrating things much easier.”
In the short term, however, it might make more sense for companies to use the vendors’ agents instead of creating their own.
“I recommend people don’t overbuild because everything is moving,” says Bret Greenstein, CAIO at West Monroe Partners, a management consulting firm. “If you build a highly complicated system, you’re going to be building yourself some tech debt. If an agent exists in your application and it’s localized to the data in that application, use it.”
But over time, an agent that’s independent of the application can be more effective, he says, and there’s a lot of lock-in that goes into applications. “It’s going to be easier every day to build the agent you want without having to buy a giant license. “The effort to get effective agents is dropping rapidly, and the justification for getting expensive agents from your enterprise software vendors is getting less,” he says.
The future of software
According to IDC, pure seat-based pricing will be obsolete by 2028, forcing 70% of vendors to figure out new business models.
With technology evolving as quickly as it is, JBGoodwin Realtors has already started to change its approach to buying tech, says Tull. It used to prefer long-term contracts, for example but that’s not the case anymore “You save more if you go longer, but I’ll ask for an option to re-sign with a cap,” he says.
That doesn’t mean SaaS will die overnight. Companies have made significant investments in their current technology infrastructure, says Patrycja Sobera, SVP of digital workplace solutions at Unisys.
“They’re not scrapping their strategies around cloud and SaaS,” she says. “They’re not saying, ‘Let’s abandon this and go straight to agentic.’ I’m not seeing that at all.”
Ultimately, people are slow to change, and institutions are even slower. Many organizations are still running legacy systems. For example, the FAA has just come out with a bold plan to update its systems by getting rid of floppy disks and upgrading from Windows 95. They expect this to take four years.
But the center of gravity will move toward agents and, as it does, so will funding, innovation, green-field deployments, and the economics of the software industry.
“There are so many organizations and leaders who need to cross the chasm,” says Sobera. “You’re going to have organizations at different levels of maturity, and some will be stuck in SaaS mentality, but feeling more in control while some of our progressive clients will embrace the move. We’re also seeing those clients outperform their peers in revenue, innovation, and satisfaction.”
