Is Software Losing Its Head?
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There are many things that made software sticky, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that it was built around, like, the way a human interacts. In an agentic world, do you actually
need that? The data, the logic, everything stored below it is really where the value is. There's this wild underestimation about like you could vibe 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. Misconception right now is that you can just have, you know, Postgres database and APIs, and then bam, like you can replace SAP. And that's like absolutely not true. That piece around the logic and everything else that is encaptured in SAP is way, way more important than the fact that like, oh, this data just happens to be in this database.
One of the things that happens in technology shifts is nobody understands exponential when it's happening. The biggest opportunity right now is
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 Sunoski, and Elena Berger discuss headless software, AI agents, enterprise architecture, and why the next generation of software m
Welcome to the a sixteen z podcast. I'm here with Sima Amble, a partner here on the enterprise team, and Steven Sonofsky, who is a board partner at a sixteen z 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 pr
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 three sixty, which was really in classic Salesforce motion history, a marketing announcement more than anything else. But it does capture it's an acknowledgment 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
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?
So I'll separate it out into the Salesforce context and then the broader context, because I think the broader context is more interesting. I
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