Enterprise software brings out the guillotine

Welcome to Runtime! Today: Three announcements this week show how enterprise software companies are moving toward "headless" services designed for agents, not people, Cerebras' IPO was almost as big as its chips, and the latest enterprise moves.

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Let them eat data

Sometimes it can be hard to remember how revolutionary the concept of enterprise software delivered through a browser or mobile app was to the business world two decades ago; after years of slogging through user interfaces only an engineer could love, worker bees flocked to new SaaS startups that prioritized human-centered design and convenience. But AI agents don't care about perfectly rounded corners.

Growing interest in the "headless" approach to enterprise software design could prove to be an equally important turning point, assuming enterprise demand for agentic AI plays out as expected over the next several years. Boomi, SAP, and Workday all unveiled new products and services this week that minimize the traditional user interface and prioritize making the corporate data they produce and manage easily digestible by AI agents, one month after Salesforce signaled its own plans to head in this direction.

• Boomi added several new features across its flagship product designed to highlight its headless-before-it-was-cool approach of being a data layer that can be accessed by other applications, and now agents.
• "We've been working in a headless world, and this is our community's time to shine. The world is going headless,” said Boomi CTO Ed Macosky, according to Constellation Research.
• Workday introduced a new version of Sana that works inside Microsoft Copilot 365, which CTO Gabe Monroy called "Headless Workday, one service at a time."
• And SAP unveiled a new version of Joule Studio designed to make it easier for agents to access the breadth of an organization's SAP data: "Before, you had an API and a UI on top, designed for humans with lazy loading — first 10 items, then the next 10. That doesn’t work for LLMs. You need the full set," SAP's Michael Ameling told The New Stack.

Forward-thinking developers realized early in the generative AI boom that when chat becomes the default input for an application, one-size-fits-all user interface designs based around buttons and menus don't make a lot of sense. Agents and assistants like OpenClaw take that concept to another level.

• Integrations have always been an important part of enterprise software design given that workers want to be able to access data or documents while working in other tools, such as pulling up a business-intelligence report in Slack.
• But those integrations still required visual cues and workflows to help users understand how to access that data quickly and securely.
•  The "headless" approach could help software companies to maintain a central role inside the enterprise by allowing their customers to use homegrown or third-party agents to work with corporate data protected by the same governance and security features already present in any enterprise-grade product, but without forcing them to deal with workflows designed for people.

This transition will take some time, but helps answer one of the pressing questions generally left unanswered by the SaaSpocalypse crowd: Are companies really going to build entirely new systems of record on their own with the same data guardrails enterprise software companies have spent decades perfecting? Some might, but headless designs would allow customers to hang on to that expertise while building their own automated and deterministic ways for agents to safely access that data.

• "SAP is not abandoning software, but it is making software less visible by embedding more execution into agents that work across the application estate," ERP Today's Tarsilla Moura wrote after this week's announcement.
• Just as the rise in design thinking in enterprise software made it easier for people to work with business data, companies embracing the headless strategy are betting that making it easier for agents to work with business data will have a similar impact.
• "We’re entering the next phase of enterprise AI, where success won’t be defined by how many agents you deploy, but by how well they are connected, governed, and grounded in trusted data," Boomi CEO Steve Lucas said during his keynote this week.

Big stack

Inference could become the most important workload of the next ten years if AI manages to worm its way into enterprise apps at scale, and Cerebras has spent the last 11 years perfecting chips designed to handle that action. Investors rewarded the company Thursday with an enormous initial public offering that instantly values the company among the leaders in enterprise tech.

Shares of Cerebras closed at $311.07 Thursday, down a bit from its opening price of $350 but a 68% jump compared to its IPO price of $185, according to CNBC. The company raised $5.5 billion with its public offering and ended the day valued at $95 billion, completing the largest tech IPO in nearly seven years.

Cerebras took a unique, on-chip memory-focused approach to its chip designs, which has set it up very well for a market that is desperately trying to snap up as much external memory as possible to power the AI boom. "As AI becomes useful, everybody wants it to become fast," CEO Andrew Feldman told Bloomberg. "Nobody wants to wait."

Enterprise moves

John DiLullo is the new CEO of PagerDuty, replacing Jennifer Tejada, who will become executive chair of the company after nearly a decade at the helm of the incident-management company.

Steve Fisher stepped down from his position as president and chief product officer at Salesforce, according to The Information, becoming just the latest in a long line of high-profile executive departures from Marc Benioff Inc.

The Runtime roundup

Anthropic will once again allow OpenClaw devotees to use their Claude AI subscriptions to serve the popular assistant with tokens, but with new monthly restrictions, according to VentureBeat.

Believe it or not, security researchers detected yet another software supply chain attack in the wild Thursday targeting node-ipc packages on npm, according to Socket.

Thanks for reading — see you Saturday!