The SaaSpocalypse debate rages on. Seat-based pricing dying. SaaS reduced to systems of record. Entire products vibe-coded away. Where I’ve landed: the core SORs with complex rule engines and embedded workflows - Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow - are so deeply embedded that most large enterprise buyers will simply use the threat of “we’ll build some of it ourselves” to negotiate lower pricing. The real question for these incumbents isn’t survival. It’s where the next revenue lever comes from.
Enter Marc Benioff. He just ripped the band-aid off.
Marc Benioff@Benioff
Welcome Salesforce Headless 360: No Browser Required! Our API is the UI. Entire Salesforce & Agentforce & Slack platforms are now exposed as APIs, MCP, & CLI. All AI agents can access data, workflows, and tasks directly in Slack, Voice, or anywhere else with Salesforce Headless
3:29 AM · Apr 17, 2026 · 1.54M Views
165 Replies · 280 Reposts · 2.94K Likes
Let’s pause and appreciate what’s happening here. Twenty-seven years ago, Benioff built Salesforce on a radical idea: kill software, move everything to the cloud, charge per seat. The “No Software” logo became iconic. He didn’t just build a company, he built the SaaS business model that an entire industry runs on. Now he’s taking a sledgehammer to his own creation. The same guy who killed on-premise software is now killing per-seat SaaS. That takes huge kahunas. And the recognition that if he doesn't do it to himself, someone else will.
Salesforce is going headless. It’s called Headless 360, and it exposes every capability in the platform as an API, MCP tool, or CLI command. 100+ new tools, day one. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex can now operate an entire Salesforce org without opening a browser.
I wrote about this exact scenario back in What’s Hot #410 (Sept 2024) - that Benioff’s push into agents could put Salesforce at existential risk because once the front-end gets reimagined with AI, the application becomes just a database and customers migrate to cheaper, faster, more agile systems. I thought this was a 5-year arc. It took 18 months. Benioff isn’t fighting it. He’s embracing it. Instead of blocking access and protecting the UI moat, he’s betting that Salesforce becomes the platform agents talk to, not the screen humans click through. As Salesforce put it: “We made a decision two and a half years ago: Rebuild Salesforce for agents.”
In other words, he’s taking the pain now.
Seat counts are already dropping. Large enterprises are renegotiating. But by getting ahead of the transition, Salesforce may find a tailwind depending on how they price. More on that later.
This is the opening shot for system of record incumbents - expect others to follow soon after. The ones who resist are telling you their moat was the UI, not the data.
There’s a deeper technical story here that matters for every enterprise deploying agents. As Salesforce EVP Jayesh Govindarjan told VentureBeat, early Agentforce customers hit a wall: “They were afraid to make changes to these agents, because the whole system was brittle. You make one change and you don’t know whether it’s going to work 100% of the time.”
The core tension is that agents are probabilistic but enterprises demand deterministic outcomes. Most real-world workflows are a mix of both - steps that must follow strict business logic and steps where the AI should reason freely. Salesforce’s answer is Agent Script, an open-sourced DSL that defines a state machine in a single flat file - versionable, auditable - where enterprises specify exactly which steps are deterministic and which are probabilistic. This is the real battleground. The winning agent platforms won't be the ones with the best models. They'll be the ones that let enterprises blend determinism and flexibility in a way that's auditable and won't break on the next update.
Short-term revenue hit. Long-term growth story. Do the math. 100,000 human users at $300/seat is $30M. Replace those seats with 1,000,000 agents making API calls 24/7 and suddenly the ceiling isn’t headcount anymore. It’s volume. Humans work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Agents work all the time. Consumption-based pricing in an agent-led world could dwarf what per-seat ever delivered. If you get the model right.
In a world where agents outnumber humans 1000+ to 1, the pricing model determines everything. Per-seat is dead. Per-call, per-outcome, per-transaction. Whoever figures out the right model doesn’t just survive. They win. The SaaS business model is being rebuilt in real time. Let’s see who moves next.
As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!
Thanks for reading What's Hot 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC! This post is public so feel free to share it.
#🤯
Nico Wittenborn@ncsh
We are in the age of consensus capital: 1- Almost 75% of all LP $ raised by 5 funds 2- Almost 75% of all VC $ invested in 5 companies
2:06 PM · Apr 15, 2026 · 97K Views
26 Replies · 82 Reposts · 442 Likes
#👀
Peter Walker@PeterJ_Walker
Top 5% of seed rounds now routinely topping $175M in valuation. Up 3x effectively over the last 12 months. Just a whiff of 2021-era ridiculousness about (even as an AI believer).
10:37 PM · Apr 10, 2026 · 111K Views
25 Replies · 33 Reposts · 287 Likes
#if you’re building in AI, hard to ignore this - the center of gravity is SF and btw congrats to our portfolio company Clay on the AI 50 list!
Anna Tong@annatonger
Of our @Forbes AI 50 list...forbes.com/lists/ai50/ 88% are US-based 64% are Bay Area-based 50% are San Francisco-based 14% are New York City-based Conclusion...if you're building an AI company, build it in San Francisco *I live in San Francisco so I'm biased
6:55 PM · Apr 16, 2026 · 5.4K Views
3 Replies · 7 Reposts · 32 Likes
#just love ❤️ sharing these stories of founder grit and resilience
#remember not all ARR is the same, just know what number you’re reporting and diligencing
Scott Stevenson@scottastevenson
It’s time to expose a huge scam in AI startups: Contracted ARR The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and misleading journalists for PR coverage. The setup:
5:38 PM · Apr 17, 2026 · 426K Views
108 Replies · 82 Reposts · 1.01K Likes
#full AI budget blown in 3 months, sure SOTA matters but good enough and costs do as well - will be interesting to see how this plays out in the enterprise
Roger@rdd147
$UBER hints it’s dumping Ai and Anthropic after blowing its entire Ai budget in 3 months on exorbitantly high costs. The prices charged by Anthropic are enough to destroy corporations budgets in 3 months, but still far below what they need to charge to reach profitability.
Anissa Gardizy @anissagardizy8
Uber's CTO told @LauraBratton5 that AI coding tools—particularly Anthropic’s Claude Code—has already maxed out its 2026 AI budget 📈 “I'm back to the drawing board, because the budget I thought I would need is blown away already,” Neppalli Naga said. https://t.co/4JIBfqUO7V
11:24 PM · Apr 14, 2026 · 213K Views
31 Replies · 83 Reposts · 1.04K Likes
Gergely nails it
Gergely Orosz@GergelyOrosz
There is massive irony in how AI coding tools are starting to become TOO expensive for many enterprises - after eg Anthropic removed subsidizing AI subscriptions. We might go from "everyone use AI for everything!" to "you have $300/month AI budget; use your brain for the rest."
8:56 AM · Apr 16, 2026 · 57.6K Views
119 Replies · 93 Reposts · 1.23K Likes
#the irony - less people who use more AI may cost you more
Callum Williams@econcallum
Insane datapoint from new Goldman report on AI and software
5:07 PM · Apr 15, 2026 · 192K Views
39 Replies · 146 Reposts · 1.15K Likes
#how Ramp built its internal AI productivity tool to get the whole org agent pilled
Shane Buchan@buchan_sm
Last week @sebgoddijn shared Glass, Ramp's internal AI productivity tool, with the world. Nearly a million views later, everyone's asking the same thing: how did you actually build this? Read the full story here: https://t.co/iR15nRiyNn The short of it: we built an app that
9:22 PM · Apr 15, 2026 · 75.3K Views
9 Replies · 17 Reposts · 377 Likes
#Aaron Levie shares what key takeaways on what the largest enterprises are thinking in terms of AI and agents - some bangers in here worth reading 👇🏻
Ed Sim@edsim
The last mile in the enterprise is the longest Great notes from Aaron One other key point I keep hammering as well - world is moving so fast, no one wants to be locked into a single vendor despite one being superior to others at moment I would also add security continues to
Aaron Levie @levie
Another week on the road meeting with a couple dozen IT and AI leaders from large enterprises across banking, media, retail, healthcare, consulting, tech, and sports, to discuss agents in the enterprise. Some quick takeaways: * Clear that we’re moving from chat era of AI to
12:36 PM · Apr 13, 2026 · 6.23K Views
4 Replies · 15 Likes
#💯 most employees aren’t builders - you need to make it easy for them (founder of Glean)
Arvind Jain@jainarvind
People have asked me whether Claude Cowork will follow the same explosive adoption as Claude Code. I think the trajectory will look different. Not because Cowork isn’t powerful, but because enterprise work is fundamentally different from engineering. Claude Code took off in part
4:38 PM · Apr 17, 2026 · 26K Views
19 Replies · 9 Reposts · 133 Likes
#impressive…
Rogo@RogoAI
We are introducing Felix. Felix is a purpose-built agent for high finance, designed for long-running, complex workflows and capable of producing decks, models, and documents end-to-end. Felix executes so you can focus where it matters.
4:00 PM · Apr 15, 2026 · 879K Views
40 Replies · 81 Reposts · 1.26K Likes
#is Project Glasswing and Mythos as good as they say it is or is it the workflow and prompts?
Eric Hartford@QuixiAI
Last week, Anthropic announced Project Glasswing alongside Claude Mythos Preview, a model they described as so powerful at finding vulnerabilities they couldn't release it. The announcement featured AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Apple as partners, $100M in compute credits, and a
1:32 AM · Apr 17, 2026 · 177K Views
47 Replies · 221 Reposts · 1.39K Likes
#a trend?
Polymarket@Polymarket
JUST IN: Google searches for “OpenClaw” have crashed to near-baseline levels.
2:21 PM · Apr 17, 2026 · 195K Views
136 Replies · 56 Reposts · 1.21K Likes
#banging on the same 🥁 - AI is not killing cybersecurity. It is accelerating it. Frontier models are turning vulnerability discovery into a commodity. When discovery becomes cheap, remediation, governance, and automated defense become the new security market.
Andrew Curran@AndrewCurran_
New model: GPT‑5.4‑Cyber 'Today we’re expanding this program by introducing additional tiers of access for users willing to work with OpenAI to authenticate themselves as cybersecurity defenders. Customers in the highest tiers will get access to GPT‑5.4‑Cyber, a model purposely
8:16 PM · Apr 14, 2026 · 54.7K Views
26 Replies · 47 Reposts · 652 Likes
#great to see older school ZIRP era unicorns accelerate growth even faster with successful launch of AI products, Parker and Rippling sharing how it’s done
Parker Conrad@parkerconrad
Rippling AI was the most successful launch we've ever done. On the heels of this launch, Rippling's revenue is now growing 78% YoY (at ARR over $1 Billion). And this growth rate has now increased, every quarter, for three straight quarters.
Parker Conrad @parkerconrad
Rippling launched its AI analyst today. I'm not just the CEO - I'm also the Rippling admin for our co, and I run payroll for our ~ 5K global employees. Here are 5 specific ways Rippling AI has changed my job, and why I believe this is the future of G&A software. 🧵 1/n
1:09 AM · Apr 15, 2026 · 382K Views
53 Replies · 115 Reposts · 935 Likes
#this will be standard for many CEOs in months, not years…privacy, security, etc will be paramount to making this work properly and truly capturing Zuck or any CEO
“The Meta chief is personally involved in training and testing his animated AI, which could offer conversation and feedback to employees, according to one person. They added that the character was being trained on the billionaire’s mannerisms, tone and publicly available statements, as well as his own recent thinking on company strategies, so that employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it.”
Financial Times@FT
Meta builds AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with staff
ft.trib.al
Meta builds AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with staff
4:20 AM · Apr 13, 2026 · 113K Views
37 Replies · 52 Reposts · 300 Likes
#and you would have thought Google’s AI adoption by engineers was a lot higher…but no, here’s why
Steve Yegge@Steve_Yegge
I was chatting with my buddy at Google, who's been a tech director there for about 20 years, about their AI adoption. Craziest convo I've had all year. The TL;DR is that Google engineering appears to have the same AI adoption footprint as John Deere, the tractor company. Most of
5:47 PM · Apr 13, 2026 · 2.38M Views
504 Replies · 426 Reposts · 4.95K Likes
#AI blends into the physical world including bio - solid market map from Bessemer (we have two port cos already with one being Topos Bio and other in stealth)
Bessemer@BessemerVP
The next generation of biotech winners won't be defined by their science alone. They'll be defined by their data infrastructure. 🧬 Bessemer's Biotech team is out with their roadmap on biology-native data infrastructure + the market map of the companies building it: →
4:58 PM · Apr 13, 2026 · 40.6K Views
8 Replies · 26 Reposts · 122 Likes
#RIP Simon Oxley, create of the Github Octocat, redesigner of Sammy the Shark and creator of our very own Sparky 😢
Ed Sim@edsim
@jedgar Rest in peace Simon and thank you for creating Sparky for us 🙏🏼
12:49 PM · Apr 14, 2026 · 7.83K Views
1 Reply · 2 Reposts · 136 Likes
#all in a year 🤯
Boring_Business@BoringBiz_
This is why investing is such a brutal game, especially if you are a technology investor Go back 1 year to May 2025. OpenAI is the category leader in AI, and Microsoft owns 27% of the business On top of that, Satya Nadella has OpenAI locked into their Azure cloud ecosystem. The
7:31 PM · Apr 17, 2026 · 67K Views
44 Replies · 32 Reposts · 588 Likes
#🎯
Rory O'Driscoll@rodriscoll
The weird thing right now is the public markets don't have access to the growth side of software. Right now the trade is to sell SaaS and buy semis (the raw material of AI). What you don’t have yet in the public markets are the AI native software companies and therefore, you’re
5:17 PM · Apr 17, 2026 · 79.4K Views
22 Replies · 29 Reposts · 397 Likes
#claude design is pretty darn good btw!
sid@immasiddx
Adobe and Figma stock after Claude Design’s announcement. It is so over. 😭
Claude @claudeai
Introducing Claude Design by Anthropic Labs: make prototypes, slides, and one-pagers by talking to Claude. Powered by Claude Opus 4.7, our most capable vision model. Available in research preview on the Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, rolling out throughout the day.
4:28 PM · Apr 17, 2026 · 4.14M Views
291 Replies · 1.68K Reposts · 18.9K Likes
#add .com, blockchain, and now just be a compute co
Geiger Capital@Geiger_Capital
Absolutely incredible… Allbirds, the shoe brand, is selling all footwear assets, renaming itself "NewBird AI", and using $50M to buy high-performance GPUs. $BIRD is up +170% this morning. 🚀
1:08 PM · Apr 15, 2026 · 168K Views
99 Replies · 50 Reposts · 731 Likes
#🤣
Negligible Capital@negligible_cap
The name of the company… NewBird AI. It is a cutting-edge, AI-native cloud infrastructure firm out of- well, they used to be out of San Francisco making sneakers, but forget that, John- they are now awaiting imminent deployment of next-generation GPU compute clusters that have
1:21 PM · Apr 15, 2026 · 571K Views
127 Replies · 785 Reposts · 8.14K Likes
#🍿 $2T in private credit, three major funds blocking redemptions in the same month, and the Fed quietly asking banks for their real numbers. This is how 2008 started - slowly, then all at once. And this time the debt is wired directly into the AI infrastructure buildout.
Bull Theory@BullTheoryio
🚨 THE FED IS NOW PRIVATELY PREPARING FOR A POSSIBLE $2 TRILLION CREDIT MARKET COLLAPSE. For the first time in over a decade, the Fed has started directly asking U.S. banks to hand over their exposure numbers to the private credit market. This is the exact move regulators make
7:27 PM · Apr 13, 2026 · 352K Views
149 Replies · 986 Reposts · 3.66K Likes