Salesforce is just an Oracle database with a few thousand buttons stuck to it.
But let me take it one step further: all enterprise applications are just databases with a poorly designed UX. This is because most enterprise software vendors have captive users who don’t have a choice in what application they use. I once became (in)famous for saying that SAP Ariba doesn’t have customers, they have prisoners, but to be honest, that is the truth of most enterprise software.
What might still need to be apparent is how radical this landscape will change. Why is every enterprise app adding an AI copilot at the moment, Simply, they need to have a reason for the user to remain in the UX because just imagine if the customer and the end-users figured out that all they need is an advanced natural language interface and a bunch of data to get work done. Without the UX, the “brand” dies of the software vendor, and then no more prisoners. The short-term solution is going to be the enterprise copilots, or rather the world of 10,000 clippy’s, I just can’t wait to explain to my Workday copilot that it has to talk to the Microsoft Office Copilot to update a commission plan in Salesforce based on a spreadsheet my boss just sent… what can possibly go wrong…
Like when smartphones emerged, it took a while before the true impact became evident. They destroyed the market for GPS, radio, cameras, newspapers, and books or radically altered them; all these used to be standalone things defined by a physical interface. We will look back at enterprise apps from this era in 10 years the same way and wonder how all these different applications were even necessary.
This creative destruction will also be immensely interesting, can we solve problems in days and weeks that used to take months or years, say digitize a supply chain or automate a health-care workflow? There is no question that the power is there. With the current race to enable GPU capacity and the massive scale of economics that will be enabled, we will see a massive explosion in innovation, not just from the big guys but from startups as well, GPUs, models, or even distribution won’t be a moat in the enterprise space, since the distribution model looks completely different once you take the apps out of the equation and start looking at the enterprise as a system of work.
The economics of distribution also change in other ways. Once we have applications that can understand most kinds of unstructured data and transform them, we will have to question the amount of work we have put into automation or even capturing and normalizing structured data at the source. LLMs are essentially the container of computing (not in the Kubernetes sense), but in the sense that they completely transform the economics of large-scale work systems, just like containers transformed world trade.
Anyone who tells you they know how this will play out doesn’t have a clue, but all I can tell you is that tomorrow won’t be like yesterday, and that is really exciting.