The end of the user interface
While the AI labs were sending out scary pronouncements and talking about slowing the pace of frontier development, Salesforce was holding its annual customer carnival in San Francisco this week, giving its customers a very different message.
Benioff and friends weren’t there to discuss how AI could potentially wipe out humanity. They were more interested in how AI could wipe out the user interface as we’ve known it.
Of course, there was pageantry aplenty at the Dreamforce keynote on Tuesday where the news kept coming for two solid hours and where guests included the rather bland Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and the surprisingly entertaining Jensen Huang, perhaps the only person on the planet who could upstage Marc Benioff.
But they weren’t there to merely celebrate the tech glitterati, they were there to sell the latest shiny new approach to the Salesforce platform. Even though Salesforce has been around for 27 years, the company recognizes that the times they are a-changin’. The CRM giant clearly understands that data is the lifeblood of AI models, and they have a lot of valuable business data. The way you enter and access it might not matter as much anymore.
The end of the world as we know it
In fact, Salesforce president of applications and marketing Patrick Stokes went so far as to say that the UI was never the interesting part of Salesforce, a huge admission for an enterprise software exec.
“The value of Salesforce has never been in the UI. It's been in the platform that stores the way our customers encode their business, and I think that might even be true for a lot of software, a lot of enterprise software,” Stokes said at the pre-keynote press event.
But he was just following the lead of Salesforce co-founder and tech guru Parker Harris, who designed the Lightning interface, which has been the center of Salesforce software lo these many years. At an event in March, Harris said, “I built the Lightning UI. I worked really hard on it. Why should you ever log into Salesforce again? Maybe you never will.”
A bold shift
All of this is an audacious viewpoint for a company like Salesforce, and it could speak to a future where the interface as we’ve known it melts away. It ties directly into the Headless 360 products announced earlier this year and the partnership with Anthropic around the recently announced Claudeforce product, each of which showed that Salesforce is walking the walk, not just talking the talk when it comes to eventually deprecating the interface. Headless gives customers a way to help agents connect to Salesforce data on the back end, while products like Claudeforce give them one way to replace the front end.
As Stokes said, maybe we won’t even miss the user interface because it actually is complicated and has gotten in the way of the user experience. “What's so exciting about this is it kind of disaggregates the UI and brings AI in to kind of replace it. And I think that's very exciting,” he said.
He believes this idea is going to impact all enterprise software, and if the vision plays out as described and we have various AI labs offering a front end to interact with the valuable data, and we have these agents entering data alongside humans, the interface becomes less important over time as the emphasis shifts to all the juicy data, business logic and context that's produced by the act of using tools like Salesforce, SAP, Workday or ServiceNow.
For now, in reality the interface may not be dead, but it's not exactly resting comfortably either because Salesforce gets that how we interact with software could be changing in a fundamental way, and the companies selling that software have to change with it. Salesforce put everyone on notice this week that it's ready, willing and able to do that.
~Ron
