In the last few months, some of the largest SaaS companies in the world have lost their minds gone headless.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tweeted (x’ed) on April 17th that the entire Salesforce (and Slack) platforms are “now exposed as APIs, MCP & CLI” so that your AI agents can perform work on your behalf.
The following week, at the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen announced Adobe CX Enterprise which includes the Adobe AI Platform - a headless version of Adobe products including Firefly, Experience Manager, Analytics and more. As with Salesforce, this new approach means your AI agents can now pull data from, and use the Adobe experience platform without you needing to use their web platform or apps.
Meta have since followed suit, on April 30 they announced a headless version of their ads platform. This allows you to manage campaigns and receive campaign reporting through your AI Agent of choice.
Not be outdone, Hubspot have been heading in this direction for some time, and their recently updated Hubspot Connector for ChatGPT allows your AI Agent to read and write data from your CRM. I have been using this on a daily basis (with OpenAI Codex) for the last few weeks, and it really is a different way of working.
Let me give an example… I have created a Skill that allows me to copy and paste an email thread into a chat in Codex, and it will connect to HubSpot and turn the email thread into a new Deal, new Contact and new Company (including some research into the company) and link these to one another. Previously I had to do this in the HubSpot web app and it took 10 minutes. Now Hubspot is headless, my “agent” does it for me in 10 seconds.
When you get comfortable with it, going headless is a revelation.
We have also been busy making our own software product Peak headless. Peak is built for marketing teams who want to be more productive with the use of AI. Until now the way a team uses Peak is by logging-in to the website, as you would expect. With this new headless approach you can run Peak ‘Skills’ from OpenAI Codex, Claude Cowork or wherever your AI Agents live.
Another benefit of a headless SaaS product is that you can extend the normal capabilities of your AI Agent. For example in Claude Cowork you cannot natively do image generation. However, via the Peak Connector you can run a marketing workflow (a Skill) that includes image generation steps, like in this video:
You can also do ‘Agent Orchestration’ and run a workflow that spans across several platforms. For example you could use OpenAI Codex to connect to Salesforce and create a customer segment, create a campaign in Adobe CX Enterprise and publish this to the meta ads platform - all without leaving Codex.
This direction of travel for SaaS products is clear, and I expect to see a lot more moving to a headless approach in the next 12 months.
Footnote: Yes, I am aware that the ‘Four Horseman of the Apocalypse’ and the ‘Headless Horseman’ are not the same story, thanks for allowing my stretched metaphor!
Footnote 2: Personally, I am desperate for Xero to go headless, if you work there and are reading this - please take note :)
Peak is a product from Time Under Tension - we created it to solve a common problem in busy marketing and product teams. Your team are using generative AI, but are they getting the best possible results?
Peak is an intuitive, all-in-one software platform to help your marketing reach new heights with AI, without having to learn “prompt engineering”, “context windows” and “model selection”. Instead of having to learn and keep up with AI, Peak helps you get the job done.
Learn more and request a demo: https://www.peakapp.ai
Here are five interesting developments from the past two weeks:
Kmart Australia debut an AI-powered shopping assistant
OpenAI Codex now works directly in Chrome with the new Chrome Extension
Pope Leo’s ‘Magnifica humanitas’: AI must serve humanity not concentrate power
Interesting read from Dan Shipper: AI progress creates more work for humans
The new Gemini Omni AI video model can do translations, style transfer and scene transfer from one prompt, we put it to the test…
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