Most companies don’t have a tool shortage. They have too many tools, too many handoffs, and too many places where context gets lost.

I joined a panel at Web Summit to talk about when consolidation actually reduces work, where AI helps, and how to avoid replacing ten mediocre tools with one very large mediocre tool.

If you'd rather read than watch, the full transcript is below.

Transcript

0:00 Hello everybody. Good to see you. We're going to have a great chat. We have some super smart people here, so it's going to be fun. We're going to start off with a bit of a joke. I mean, like, you know, I've always kind of laughed at the idea of a tech stack, a company having a tech stack. I think they more often have a blob. Don't you agree? I I would say it's not even a joke. It's uh it's a blob or a morass or like a

0:22 collection. Um like people like the bigger the enterprise, the more programs they accumulate. I think we don't realize like I think the average company buys about one piece of software per employee. I've I've seen the enterprise data and it's like 1,000 or 1,500 different apps that are running in the various places. There's of course the official ones and

0:46 the unofficial ones. Anyways, we're going to talk about AI and consolidating the tech stack. Are we really consolidating it? Are we just massively changing it? When? Well, I think, look, this is happening. This is happening. Things are different now. I mean, you see Salesforce going headless, and you also see that when it comes to AI applications, a lot of the lighter applications getting absorbed into that. So, from where we're sitting,

1:09 what we're seeing is really two things. One, we believe the lighter applications are going to essentially just uh completely taken over by AI. However, the heavier stuff, they're probably going to go uh headless, similar to Salesforce. Now, the fundamental change that we're seeing is um AI, like agentic AI like GenSpark, like my company, [laughter]

1:30 is going to come out and become the new user of software, of SaaS. So, that is the fundamental change. And with that, we actually don't see the usage of SaaS going down. We see it blowing up. Because AI is going to be a lot faster than human beings to use all the SaaS products. But again, the lighter ones are going to become free, are going to

1:53 become just available and customized anywhere, uh essentially in all of these, you know, Agenty AI platforms. David, your thoughts? I think my take is it's a lot like the early days of the internet where when the internet first came out, there were hundreds of thousands of websites that came out for every single topic that you could think of, but it started to slowly consolidate over time cuz you can't remember all the products that you're

2:15 utilizing, all the websites that you want to go to, and you started to go and say like, "Hey, a super center like Amazon makes sense." You go to three different news sites instead of the 500 news sites that are out there, and you're seeing that level of consolidation. I think we are in that Cambrian explosion of AI tools. You don't want to stop people from using the tools that they need, that they want to experiment with, but I think it is going to be really it's going to happen in very short order that you're going to

2:37 see a good level of consolidation to say, "Okay, this is my system of record for meetings. This is my system of record for sales. This is my system of record for CRM, etc." Like, that will happen because you can't have 500 solutions on top of mind, and then you're starting to look at your bill, and you're going to start to realize like, "Oh, why am I spending so much on so many variable things?" It is super interesting because you mentioned already Salesforce came out

3:00 with an announcement they're going headless, which is very cool, actually. Wait, does everyone know what that means? So, if it's not headless, you're going in like a caveman to the user interface, and you're typing in your stuff, right? This is a customer record. I talked to the salesperson, blah blah blah, type it all down. Boring, slow, mistake-prone. Headless, I tell my agent to do it. My agent goes and connects via APIs to

3:24 Salesforce, and just does it for me, which is really cool. And I even talked to the the Salesforce PR people, and you can use open claw with if if if if your [laughter] if your enterprise people let you. Avery, your thoughts on this whole consolidation? Well, I think I mean, any any major technological shift, and this might be the biggest technological shift anyone has ever lived through, right? There's

3:47 going to be there's going to be winners, there's going to be companies that go into decline, and there's going to be a whole bunch of brand new stuff. Uh when you look at big enterprises, they're not going to change very fast. They They when they say fast, you think as fast as you might change. But what they mean is like in the next 10 years, we might slightly shift the collection of software that we're running. The really big thing that I think will change though is like AI is is this universal translator. We actually finally built it

4:12 the universal translator from Star Trek, like not even kidding, right? But it not only can translate between any human languages, it can translate between any software, right? Which is like the ultimate goal of so many IT projects is like can I please connect my Salesforce into my Snowflake database and then give me a dashboard that just tells me this thing that I couldn't get

4:34 from like one of those two things on their own. And it is really hard to do that and huge teams at enterprises have been like tasked to do this and failed. And now you can do it in 10 minutes with this AI. And that that is a huge difference, but it doesn't mean the set of software is going to get less. I think it means all of a sudden you can buy even more software and then connect it all together in this like incredible hairball that can only be understood by

4:56 a computer. Yeah. That's kind of hilarious, right? I mean because there's this yin and yang of software, right? Which is like somebody builds a tool and it's freakishly awesome and it does one thing incredibly well and then they think, "Huh, what else could it do?" And you know, 5 years later you have a suite and you've got a platform and you've got an app ecosystem, right? And so you have this continual expansion and then

5:18 everybody's like, "Oh, it's there's such a general tool. I just need this one thing that does one thing right." And so we have this cycle going on and on. We talked about the SaaS apocalypse when we were chatting earlier and that's affected valuations, right? But you guys are mostly saying that SaaS apocalypse is overrated. Your thoughts, David? Uh it's overrated. If you look at the

5:40 earnings, like DataDog actually was hit by the SaaS apocalypse, stock went down and then all of a sudden they came out and said like, "Actually, our growth has reaccelerated because AI is actually driving revenue for us and it's growing." Now, there's a subset of SaaS companies that have actually been hit where there's companies like uh HubSpot would be one example where they're still growing 20%, which is huge for a $3 billion company. They're growing 20%.

6:03 So, it's not SaaS apocalypse like the money is disappearing. It's more along the lines of your growth rate is slowing down and then the public markets are giving you a lower valuation. I wish my growth rate was slowing down from 20 to 20%. What kind of percentage? So, I actually have a different take on that, John. So, Go for it. I mean, look, if you take a look at the the trajectory of Salesforce stock, I mean, today I just checked, the market

6:26 cap is $136 billion, right? I remember checking this 2 years ago at the peak of the pandemic it was over $450 billion. That was $300 billion gone. Why? I mean, those are facts. So, basically, to what you gents just said earlier, like um I think what David said is um companies could still grow if they could

6:50 create a new value and taking advantage of AI, but if you don't do that and if you just sit there still, then of course, the value is going to disappear because the fundamental change is happening right now in a way that um the the we've all been a victim, in my view, to your description, John. To so many tools, so many SaaS. Everybody said like Software victim. Yeah, yeah, like we're we're so busy.

7:12 Like the world world was so tool-centric. Each of us would have to learn how to use 20, 30, 40 tools. We used to get you know, people used to get certified for being good at Excel. Yep. That world, in in our view, is long gone. Okay? You don't have to get certified for being good at using the software. You just got to be good at understanding what you want and then command your AI agent. And then your AI

7:36 agent would go and learn how to use tools. And and you don't even have to switch contacts, switch tools, like copy and pasting the same piece of business context you from meeting notes to slack to email to presentation. None of that. You tell your Jasper I want this meeting note turn into a prototype and boom it's done. Human beings on the two ends. Show of hands here who who has a AI

7:58 agent? At least one. Yeah, we got some. Who has more than one? More than five? More than 10? Wow, I think we got them there. Oh no, there was a hand at the very back there. Wow, you are super user, ma'am. Uh any comeback there, David? Oh, in terms of meeting notes? Yeah. In terms [laughter]

8:19 Let's talk about the SAS apocalypse. As long as read AI is one of those meeting notes, I'm okay with it. [laughter] Now, I I think people do experiment. Uh people get preferences. There are different use cases for different types of products. Yes. Um what you're just like you talked about, there's more features that we're adding. We're doing more than just meetings. We're doing search. We've got a digital assistant. We've got a digital twin. When you add those things together though, at some point you will go and

8:43 say this is good enough or this is better than the rest and I don't need to pay for all those. Yeah. And especially when you think about the platform-based solutions like uh with Microsoft Teams, with Zoom companion AI, with Google Gemini. Those are all great solutions on a standalone basis, but there is a real narrative to go and say how do you work across the different platforms? And that's what's been important with Open Comp OS like you're able to go in and work across everything. And I think there is a

9:05 scenario where you want a solution that works across everything or you've got to buy three, four, five, six different solutions. Cool. For the panelists on the stage, you have an agent, right? How many agents? Just a number. Uh I mean on Jasper we have One number. How many? 30 plus. 30 Oh, wow. Uh we've got one for 5 million uh MAUs

9:28 on a monthly basis. Uh how many agents, Avery? I just have one agent but Oh, you're agent poor. Well, I'm not impressed. Cuz it spins up agents dynamically. Are you even qualified [laughter] I'm just bugging you. Avery, um when talked about this value in the quote-unquote SaaS apocalypse, going other places, where's the value going?

9:51 Where's the value going? So, I saw a survey a couple months ago from CIOs and CISOs and they said like for the first time in their memory, in the build versus buy decision, they're actually buying less products this year. And in fact, they're going to be planning to spend less money on licenses for SaaS products and starting to build more things internally. And that's that's never happened in the history of of of software.

10:15 So, those hundreds of billions of dollars are going to OpenAI and they're going to Anthropic and they're going to Google maybe and other places like that, token costs. Well, I would say to what Avery just said, we've heard similar things, but that is really largely because what was impossible now is possible. Yep. Building out everything for your company, it was not possible. You have

10:38 to buy other people's solutions, but now, you know, for example, with just by AI developer, you don't have to know how to code. You just need to know what you need and one of the And the beauty of it is is you can build exactly what you need. Exactly. And I don't have to customize my business processes to this Salesforce giant or something like that. I can build exactly what I need. Okay, guys, 12 minutes.

10:59 20% of what Salesforce what Salesforce built anyways. Exactly. you pay for the whole thing? Yeah, people Right. People underestimate the the cost of procuring software. It's not just the dollars of the software, it's that when you buy it, it's actually not exactly what you want, right? You are you're you're satisfying yourself with something that's almost right because it's so much less expensive than building the thing

11:21 that is exactly what you want, right? And there's there's a marketing book that I read, it's from the 1980s and it was talking about ketchup. Right? And at one point, they you know, the the companies making ketchup went into a survey of all the consumers and they found the perfect consumer and they said this is the average ketchup that everybody's going to like the best and they sold that ketchup and nobody liked it. Right? And eventually they figured

11:44 out it's like, oh, you know what? There's a whole bunch of different people like whole that like a whole bunch of different things, right? And now if you go to the grocery store there's like 17 kinds of ketchup and if you go to the pharmacy there's like an entire aisle of toothpaste even though there's only two manufacturers, right? Because everybody wants a slightly different kind of toothpaste. And we do not have that in well, I don't meeting recording apps, right? Like there's a lot of meeting

12:06 recording apps now but there's still not the one that does exactly what I want every single time. Okay, going to transition a little bit here and we're going to talk about the AI native stack and what that looks like and we'll start over here. What does the AI native stack look like? What are we What are we going to move into? So, our viewpoint uh John is consistent with what I just said like the most the

12:29 natural most human way to work is us having one uh point to to to joke, one one thing to work with, one um system interact with, but we get everything done. In other words, you tell that one system what you want to do, it figures out the right place to go, the right software to update, the right thing to do. Exactly. Sounds like magic. Yeah, so today how I work is I text my Jasper Claw every morning, what's going

12:54 on in my inbox? And actually it sends me a morning brief. Like oh, these emails Yeah, you you you exactly. Yeah, you should pay attention. All the others I'll just triage to all your sub orders, right? Like I get off the airplane, I ask my Jasper Claw, okay, where should I go to eat dinner? Like it just figures out where [laughter] I'm I'm staying. need to exist anymore? It could be just your Claw. It's just your agent.

13:17 David, I'll go to you. Uh what does the AI native stack look like? I think it looks a lot like what we're doing now. Um it's going to be within your existing workflows. It's going to be subtle changes that you see. I don't think it's going to be a new portal, a bunch of new software that you're going in logging into every single day. It's going to be, "Hey, you get an email. Your agent pings you and says, 'Hey, here are 10 things that you should do today.'" You decide what 10 things you want to do. You go and you say, "Go do

13:40 that. Go deploy it." You don't even see what's happening on the back end because the agent is negotiating with other agents and other systems of record. I think that's where we're going to go. I don't think it's going to be like this brand new solution. I don't even think the ChatGPT interface, the Claude interface is the long-term interface on how we want to interact. If you think about how we consume content today, it's no longer long-form. It's no longer going to movie. It's on a screen for

14:03 15-second bites that you're looking at and you're swiping up to the next thing. And I think decision-making is going to be a lot like that. And a lot of people say like, "That's that's MARGINALIZING THE HUMAN." OH, WON'T THAT result in a lot of awful decisions? I made a decision on 15 seconds of attention. But it's going to end up with certain outcomes and it's going to be optimized outcomes. So, I'll give you the best possible example. Meta today, all you do is put a pixel on your site, you throw

14:26 variations of creative, and you could spend $4 million and get $8 million at the end of the month, and you don't even know how it works, but it's happening. I think that's the way we're going to go. It's like, "I have a problem. I want a solution against this." I decide between three options, and the agent goes and does that. Ignorance is a business advantage. Okay, I got it. Um Avery, going to you. Uh your input on what the AI native stack looks like.

14:49 So, I think, you know, I I I sometimes I'm a bit of a dreamer. I think this can go in a lot of different directions. With every major technological shift, we have a real opportunity to flush all of our mistakes from the last generation down the toilet. [laughter] You're a dreamer for sure. You have made You have made so many mistakes in the last generation, right? The best thing about AI-centric systems is that they're not really AI-centric

15:11 cuz the AI doesn't care, right? The AI will do what it's told, right? Which means you can finally have human-centric systems cuz the systems we've been living in for the last 15 years are not human-centric. They're like super weird mega corporations running our lives because they made all the software that mediates every single thing we do, right? And now they're not They don't have to be the only ones who can make

15:33 the software. I can make the software that does what I want it to do using the power of an agent that yeah, there's an LLM in the sky that like understands how to do stuff, right? But it's a fundamentally different thing. Like when someone talks about building an AI agent, if it's somebody else's AI agent and if you go to a website and you get a chatbot instead of a human for doing support, it's annoying. If you send your chatbot to the website to do the job,

15:58 it's exciting and empowering, right? And that is the difference. Like I want the ability to make a computer and make the world do what I want, not something that's going to present me with 10,000 options and make me make a decision every 15 seconds. Like those are not important decisions, right? Just I want food and I'm you know, ask me what kind of food I want and then tell me where to go.

16:18 I've wondered for a while now why websites aren't basically, you know, a prompt basically or a prompt insertion text box basically. Like what do you want and here you go, right? Like basically that. But is that the interface of the future? Is the interface of a future a text box? Let's start here. Well, look, I think that that that should be viewed as an option. Meaning

16:42 that when you don't want to spend time to browse through things, you don't have to. I think that option would exist. I I and but I don't think it's just a text box. Today, I could speak to my Jasper agent. I talk to it. Like it is a lot more humane than just typing on a laptop or you know, even typing your phone. I speak to my Jasper cloud through WhatsApp's voice.

17:05 That is how work should be done. That we all should feel like a Jensen Huang or a Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan. You don't see them typing hard to get work done. You see them calling up their associates and they run around for you, right? Like we can all have a fleet of Goldman Sachs analysts running our pocket doing work for us while we focus on the strategic and creative stuff. That's our vision. That's what we all deserve. You were the guy with 30 agents, right?

17:27 Yes. [laughter] But I don't have to manage 30 agents. I just manage one. I have noticed, by the way, that when you do manage agents, sometimes they have conflicts and it's like managing people. It's like that that agent didn't give me what I wanted and that agent didn't give me It's it's it's interesting. It's not perfect. Uh my agents make mistakes and I apologize to our investors because of that.

17:49 I'm telling you it's real. It happened. Crossed emails, but I would say still the mentality is anything new, there are going to be mistakes, there are going to be risks. I decided I'm just going to eat the mistakes myself and just take a full advantage of it. I agree. I agree. Absolutely. David, your thoughts? User interface of the future, is it us just talking? I don't think so cuz

18:13 you don't know what you don't know. So right now, what we've done is we've gone in and said like, "Hey, you've got all your data, you can create a digital twin, you can ask it questions." But it doesn't have enough context about the entire business. If I think what something is a right answer to a client and it says, "Hey, you close the deal at a 60% rate when you answer it this way." I want the knowledge from my rest of my team where it's like, "Hey David, if you actually answered it this way, your close rate goes up to 90%." You need to

18:36 have that information accessible. But I don't know to ask that. I don't know to go and say like, "Hey, did Charlie's call on Tuesday at 4:00 go well? What were the questions?" You want the AI to actually go in and contextualize and say, "Hey, you're a salesperson." And this goes to your kind of point on the meeting notes. You've got a situation where it's like you want the AI and this is what we're doing is you can go and say, "This is a sales call. If it is a sales call, these are the takeaways that I want. This is

18:58 how I want to format it and I want to look beyond just one person's data because I need to get the entire data set." And the best example I have is we've got a fan customer where they've got a product team in Tokyo, LA, and London. And right now, each one of those teams don't talk with each other because they don't speak the same language, they're in different time zones, but they're interviewing customers. Now, what they're doing is actually going and

19:21 saying, "Hey, I'm using AI to cross all the customer interviews. And if someone says, 'I don't like this feature,' that might be it. Like, only one person in my area said that." Well, did you know that 60% of people in Japan said that? Did you know that 75% of people in London said that? I don't know. The prompt is there to ask that question. But now, the AI is going to go and say like, "This is actually a pretty big deal. This should be number one on your product queue." Interesting. Avery, is there sometimes some value in doing things the hard way?

19:45 I've done a lot of data analysis in my life. Sometimes as an analyst, sometimes as a journalist, and sometimes getting the answer from the genie out of the bottle is amazing and incredible. Sometimes I understand the problem better, and I understand the solution better if I do it the hard way and analyze it myself from the baseline data. Thoughts? Yeah, I think I mean, in in

20:07 organizational theory, we have this idea of a core competency, right? Like, what does your business do that is like the fundamental thing that you do better than everybody else? And you should outsource everything that's not your core competency, and you should keep your core competency. And I think that is that is a value we can apply in the AI world as well, right? Like, if you're really, really, really good at something, you should identify what that thing is, and you should not hand it to

20:29 the AI agent to do for you, right? Uh but everything else that like, "Look, I'm not that good at this thing. I'm kind of average at this thing, or maybe I'm just like maybe I'm above average, but it's still not the best thing I'm at." Like, delegate that. And that's the same rule. Like, you know, I'm a CEO of a company. We have 300 employees, right? When I delegate stuff, do I get exactly what I wanted? Like, no. No, that's not how humans work, right?

20:52 They build what they wanted, and hopefully it's more or less what you wanted. But when I go and do something specifically myself, I don't have very much time. I have 1/300 of the time at the company. I better choose very, very carefully which thing absolutely positively has to be done my way. And there's only a very small number of things, but when I do those things, it's better. I think that's a great answer. I absolutely love that. Okay, we have just

21:14 about just less than 2 minutes left. Each of you take a third of that time, please. And the question is, we've all talked about, "Hey, I can build exactly the software I want. I can design my information ecosystem around my desires. I can be very egocentric about all this all this stuff." What about maintenance? What about maintaining code? Let's start here. You got like 30 seconds and go

21:36 down the row. I mean, look, so um the way we're entering in this token economy is it's not going to be overnight, but things are happening fast. Mhm. So, I would say my recommendation is on the one hand, obviously, we still got to get the day-to-day done, but on the other hand, I'd say hold yourself back when you wanted to just apply yourself, but really allow AI to get onto your tasks first for you. Because with that,

22:02 you can get out of the busy work. You can actually have time to think. And you can actually, you know, uh focus on the rather strategic things instead of just hustling. Cool. That is how we Yeah. Cool. David. I think the big thing is you've got to pick the system of records and then build around that with the customization. So, pick what you are going to use and build on top of. Do some customization there. Don't do it yourself. Don't do it something where

22:24 it's like you've got one person on your team working on it. You've got to pick some platform, some AI solution to go in and say, "This is a certified This is an approved process." So, it scales out. A neighbor. All right. I'll say maintenance, when you think about it, digital stuff is the only stuff that doesn't degrade just by existing, right? The out The real world just like falls apart if you leave it sitting there. Software for some reason

22:49 stops working after a while. What is that reason? It's because the platform it's running on when it changed out from under you. I think the neatest thing about AI is you can build your own thing and just tell it, "Please stop changing this." And it won't change. And you don't need to maintain it necessarily. other answer is that code is disposable. And if it if it doesn't suit me anymore, I don't need to maintain it. I'll just generate some new. Anyways, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much,

23:11 guys. That was super awesome and fun. I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks, everybody.