[The story]
For thirty years, software has
come in two shapes.
Introduction
Application software was built for people. It was safe and forgiving, with the aim of enabling low volumes of high-context, non-deterministic work. It didn’t matter that it was slow, because people could only move so fast, and there is a limit to the work that could be done.
Infrastructure was built to be driven by machines. It was fast, complex, and designed for deterministic work at scale. You can query millions of rows and get answers in seconds, but only for predetermined questions about highly structured data.
Neither shape was built
for agents.
An agent can do the high context work of a person at the speed and scale of a machine.
Agents unlock previously impossible customer experiences at unprecedented scale, and provide a radically personalized customer experience, freeing your team to focus on the highest leverage work. An agent can assist every customer relationship, hold more context than any single person could, and find growth opportunities that you couldn’t see before.
In the history of software, there’s never been a better time to be unreasonably ambitious about what you can achieve, and there is so much more potential.
But we’re only scratching the surface.
To realize this potential and build context at scale, agents need more than any system of record was built to provide.
People build context by consuming an extraordinary amount of information. We read emails, listen to calls, and message each other on Slack. That information lets us provide great customer experiences, and the system of record was the artifact we created with that context.
For agents to deliver these experiences, they need to centralize and index all of that disparate, unstructured data, within the system of record.
The problem is that this rich context exceeds what those systems can store, and forces agents to use infrastructure instead. Infrastructure wasn’t built for this. Infrastructure doesn’t offer the guardrails, observability, or validation that you need. Agents are constrained by the limitations of our tools.
There are five reasons why:
For every one record a human might check, an agent can read thousands. Software built for human traffic can’t carry that load.
Agents are only as good as the context you give them. They’ll read and act on whatever they can find, even if it’s only half the picture.
Agents need an interface that represents the rules and validations of the system without the overhead of UI made for people.
Agents are trained to use common coding techniques. Proprietary languages and complex UI don’t make sense to them.
Agents require a different kind of identity to people. They need to see deeper context than a person would, but for a much narrower slice.
The problem
Every CRM is built as application software, and inherits these problems. All were built for a person
, and all are about to be driven by something that is not one.
Software has never mattered more, yet it’s never been less prepared.
Power at this scale needs something that has never existed before.
- A new architecture with the guardrails of application software and the throughput of infrastructure.
- A single system, equally built for people and agents.
- GTM needs a new shape of software.
