Barnir

The more I meet enterprise CIOs and AI leaders outside of tech, the more it’s obvious that if you’re building software that doesn’t have a great headless mode, you’re going to be at risk in the coming years. Asked a group of 20 IT leaders across banking, media, finance, and healthcare if they will have any vendors left in 3-5 years that don’t have a good API option for their service and it was a unanimous “no”. This is clearly going to change the nature of software going forward. You have to be completely comfortable serving up your value proposition as much through agent on or off your platform, as you are your own interface. I suspect most platforms will make it to the other side because of how forceful the trend will be, but of course some won’t if their heads in the sand. But on the other end, the upside is that in a world of 100X+ more agents doing work with with software than people ever did, there are far more use-cases to drive and be a part of. In many ways it’s a renaissance if you’re tied to critical data or workflows because of what customers can now use you for. It will certainly force an evolution of business models over time - whether you embed all of this agentic usage in a seat license or make it all consumption based - but dollars will always flow to where value is created. Going to be fun!

startup idea: sim card slots on laptops so you never depend on wifi again

דליפה חדשה מאנתרופיק. נראה שהם מכינים כלי חדש לבניית אפליקציות full-stack בתוך הממשק של Claude בווב – במיוחד למשתמשים פחות טכניים. אם זה נכון, יש מצב שהם הולכים לבלוע את כל השוק: Lovable, Base44, Bolt, Replit ודומיהם. כל הכלים האלה הם בעצם מעטפת למודלי שפה כמו Claude ו-GPT. עכשיו אנתרופיק רוצה לשחרר את אותו הדבר בעצמה – ולהיכנס גם לשוק של המשתמשים הלא-טכניים שנרתעים מ-Claude Code. ### סטארטאפים שמתבססים רק על מעטפת למודלי שפה – זה אחד הדברים הכי פחות בטוחים בתקופה הזאת. מספיק שאחת החברות הגדולות מחליטה להיכנס לשוק ולספק את אותו מוצר – רק טוב יותר – וזה שוחט מאות סטארטאפים בבת אחת. אם אתם בונים סטארטאפ, חייב להיות בו ערך מוסף שיש רק לכם וקשה לשכפול.

If you want to succeed with an early-stage startup, your best move might be far away from Silicon Valley, to a small city with an active startup community of its own.

Another week on the road meeting with a couple dozen IT and AI leaders from large enterprises across banking, media, retail, healthcare, consulting, tech, and sports, to discuss agents in the enterprise. Some quick takeaways: * Clear that we’re moving from chat era of AI to agents that use tools, process data, and start to execute real work in the enterprise. Complementing this, enterprises are often evolving from “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach to adoption to targeted automation efforts applied to specific areas of work and workflow. * Change management still will remain one of the biggest topics for enterprises. Most workflows aren’t setup to just drop agents directly in, and enterprises will need a ton of help to drive these efforts (both internally and from partners). One company has a head of AI in every business unit that roles up to a central team, just to keep all the functions coordinated. * Tokenmaxxing! Most companies operate with very strict OpEx budgets get locked in for the year ahead, so they’re going through very real trade-off discussions right now on how to budget for tokens. One company recently had an idea for a “shark tank” style way of pitching for compute budget. Others are trying to figure out how to ration compute to the best use-cases internally through some hierarchy of needs (my words not theirs). * Fixing fragmented and legacy systems remain a huge priority right now. Most enterprises are dealing with decades of either on-prem systems or systems they moved to the cloud but that still haven’t been modernized in any meaningful way. This means agents can’t easily tap into these data sources in a unified way yet, so companies are focused on how they modernize these. * Most companies are *not* talking about replacing jobs due to agents. The major use-cases for agents are things that the company wasn’t able to do before or couldn’t prioritize. Software upgrades, automating back office processes that were constraining other workflows, processing large amounts of documents to get new business or client insights, and so on. More emphasis on ways to make money vs. cut costs. * Headless software dominated my conversations. Enterprises need to be able to ensure all of their software works across any set of agents they choose. They will kick out vendors that don’t make this technically or economically easy. * Clear sense that it can be hard to standardize on anything right now given how fast things are moving. Blessing and a curse of the innovation curve right now - no one wants to get stuck in a paradigm that locks them into the wrong architecture. One other result of this is that companies realize they’re in a multi-agent world, which means that interoperability becomes paramount across systems. * Unanimous sense that everyone is working more than ever before. AI is not causing anyone to do less work right now, and similar to Silicon Valley people feel their teams are the busiest they’ve ever been. One final meta observation not called out explicitly. It seems that despite Silicon Valley’s sense that AI has made hard things easy, the most powerful ways to use agents is more “technical” than prior eras of software. Skills, MCP, CLIs, etc. may be simple concepts for tech, but in the real world these are all esoteric concepts that will require technical people to help bring to life in the enterprise. This both means diffusion will take real work and time, but also everyone’s estimation of engineering jobs is totally off. Engineers may not be “writing” software, but they will certainly be the ones to setup and operate the systems that actually automate most work in the enterprise.