Get ready for headless everything

Last month I attended the CRM Playaz IRL event in Atlanta, where I had a memorable conversation with Alan Berkson, who runs analyst relations at Contentful, a headless content management company. Headless is simply a term for separating the front end user interface from the back end code. It was popularized by content management vendors as a way to connect to the content in their repositories via APIs without having to futz with an interface.

That is precisely what agents do. They bypass the interface to do stuff. Humans need an interface, but agents, being digital, just need to speak code to code. Alan and I were discussing this at IRL and I told him I should write a post called 'Headless Everything.' 

Last week, Salesforce announced Headless 360, which told me I'd sat on this idea a beat too long. So let's talk headless. Salesforce launched as one of the first popular SaaS companies with the tagline "The End of Software" There was software of course, but you ran it in the browser instead of locally. The latest tag line is "No Browser Required." Onward we march into the future.

It's worth noting that this isn't the first time that Salesforce dipped its toe into the headless waters. It was talking about headless commerce years ago, but this is clearly an answer to the expected switch to agents doing work alongside humans.

In a conversation with Aaron Levie earlier this year, we talked about the power of the headless idea as it relates to Box and content management in general in the age of agents. "This idea of having a headless content management system that an agent can read from and write to is incredibly powerful for an AI architecture," Levie told me.

Humans still need software too

But Levie doesn't see the end of the front end by any means. He sees a world where agents and humans will work on the software with each having distinctly different needs when it comes to interacting with the application. "Where we believe we have the killer app is while agents need to be in a headless fashion, humans need to be able to still go and browse the files and see them and see what the agent did," he said. And that should apply regardless of whether it's Box, Salesforce or any other application. 

This is especially true, the higher the stakes involved in whatever the agent is doing. Twilio CEO Khozema Shipchandler, whose company is best known for its communications APIs, doesn’t see a world where agents work without human oversight.

"I don't think there'll be a human out of the loop ever. A lot of the things that we do are high value transactions that have to go well. I think giving that up entirely over to an agent is highly, highly unlikely," he said.

If they are right, that means most companies are going to maintain a dual development path, one for human users and one for the agents. But the agentic piece means that today, the headless idea is more relevant than ever as companies try to deploy them to take actions with far more intelligence than earlier generations of software. While we humans will continue to interact with software as before, if agents take off the way the hype suggests, this pattern will only grow more important, and we may indeed be heading into an era of headless everything.

~Ron