New Middleman, Same as the Old Middleman
Salesforce is rebuilding its platform so AI agents, not people, are the primary users. The engineering's good. The question nobody's asking is who inherits the customer relationship when your system of record becomes a utility something else plugs into.
There is a sentence buried in a Salesforce developer post from early May that deserved more attention than it got. The team released an open-source connector for Data 360, the customer data engine some of us still think of as Data Cloud, and described it almost in passing as a way to continue their headless journey. Mark King slap bass intensifies.
Headless. Hold onto that word.
What they shipped lets an AI assistant reach straight into your customer data platform and run about two hundred operations on its own. Build a segment. Resolve an identity. Run a calculated insight. Push an audience out to another platform. No clicking through Setup, no human on a screen. The interface we all trained our teams on becomes optional. The agent talks to the data through a shared protocol, and the screen is left on for the people who still like to watch the work happen. And this is fantastic.
Let me be fair about why this is good, because it is. Two hundred raw endpoints would drown any model's working memory, so the engineers hid them behind three clean tools: one to search for the right capability, one to fetch an example, one to run it. That is genuinely elegant. Everyone's crazy 'bout a sharp dressed AI. If you are building agents against enterprise data, you want exactly this.
"I feel like there's a 'but' here, isn't there?"
Oh, you betcha! Midwesternisms aside, for time immemorial your CRM team has been living a Sisyphean nightmare of trying to get the company to see the value and vision while being the system of record, and likely had to deal with brand folks asking if the CRM was part of the Tri-Lams in college. IYKYK.
We've all seen the memes of "logging it in" or "updating the CRM." Well, to quote Frank Reynolds from It's Always Sunny: I'm about to get weird with it.
Headless things are cool. See aforementioned Mark King, Horsemen, and websites. Buuuut, it's also a slight Catch-22. The system becomes both more important and more invisible/interchangeable.
"Quoi?" you say. "Ouais," I respond, because who cares about formality.
The system becomes a glorified power strip with enough outlets to power a DOTA LAN party. Everything plugs in, exchanges things, and moves on. And yes, I know outlets are a one-way, non-data-sharing layer. Maybe I should have said ethernet. Look, it doesn't entirely matter.
The point being, those plug-ins for your system are agentic, not just an API connection, and that agent has access to all the tools and connections, where it becomes the actual seat on that CRM/MOPs platform, calling whatever it wants to orchestrate your needs. Pretty trick, right?
"But you said there was a catch?"
Yeah, I'm getting there, Yossarian. Remember that content platform Salesforce spent a billion Benioff-Bucks on? Welcome the new middleman, same as the old middleman.
Ownership, and an asymptotic "360-degree Customer Golden Record," is practically our secret-society password. An agentic layer kinda, sorta removes a degree of that ownership. Yes, the data still lives with you, but now there are all of these layers the AI agent is looking through and using to create better experiences. The agent replaces a data broker, a connector, and the like, and becomes the conversationalist with your zero- and first-party data.
To spell it out more plainly, it's not that we lose ownership, but we lose control and understanding of the nuances of our data and architecture. That may not seem important, but it is. Knowing what's there and what's connected helps drive insight and innovation. Giving more of that up, I think we lose a layer of intimacy with our customer.
I'm not at all saying we abandon this agentic future. Are you kidding? This is my Majel Barrett LCARS dream coming true. But it does strongly suggest a need to question who watches the watchers.
This feels so similar to the early days of semi-automatic transmissions. All the convenience and control! But not really. Any gear change you request is just that, a request, a suggestion. Ultimately the transmission control unit has full say. Don't get me started on electronic throttle, conveniently marketed as "drive by wire" to elicit the feeling of being a fighter-jet pilot.
The illusion of control can be a dangerous thing to be overly confident about, right up until something happens. The data was set up incorrectly, so the agent did its job and built the audience you asked for, but sent the wrong message. The metrics the agent reviews suggest Cohort A is likely to convert, but don't contextualize the other signals suggesting otherwise.
Our roles shift from practitioner-operator to strategist-peer reviewer-quality controller. That's neither good nor bad. My concern is complacency. That is a slope so slippery it has no coefficient of friction.
The solve is simple. Governance, checks and balances, due diligence, and verify, then trust. That's a much better use of human power than being the CRM data jockey. But once those things fall by the wayside, get ready to roll that rock up a frictionless hill.
Anthony
← More writing · If this was useful, or wrong in an interesting way, tell me: hireme@crmjedi.com.
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