Rebirth of SaaS

Tech stack consolidation and AI hype have led many investors to question the role that Software-as-a-Service will play in an AI-enabled economy. Such concerns are misguided. Core business platforms are more important than ever. AI merely changes the role of specific apps, and the capabilities needed by operations teams managing the stack. That's an incredibly disruptive transition for technology companies. AI teams need their agents to interact with the existing tech stack. To meet that demand, martech vendors are being forced into deep architectural changes. Yet, AI automation does not replace all manual processes. Tech firms need to redesign their platforms without disrupting their customer's day-to-day workflows.

This month has seen several attempts to pull off the required product transition. Both Salesforce and Adobe have announced major platform changes in order to boost the use of AI agents. The two vendors are motivated by subtly different goals. Salesforce are looking to open up their platform to new AI driven business processes. Adobe are looking to automate existing marketing workflows with an AI decision engine that can orchestrate content and campaign processes across their entire portfolio. These ambitions aren't just about meeting customer needs, they're both looking to resolve the key business challenge inherent in being the dominant vendor in a mature technology market.

Adobe CX goes Agentic

Adobe Experience Cloud has long been a mix of disparate best-in-class martech products. There have been various attempts to combine the different acquisitions into a unified suite. None have succeeded in terms of strategic vision or product execution. Instead, the likes of AEM, Magento and Marketo remain separate apps loosely connected through a real time CDP that few people either understand or use. Adobe want their CDP to become a coherent end-to-end marketing engine, but it remains just another Adobe martech product. Building a mix of AI agents into the platform layer at least gives the Adobe CX suite a reason to exist as a collective bundle.

Getting Adobe customers to adopt the various agents is the key challenge. As with many agents, Adobe's new AI capabilities utilises a credit based pricing model, which means that simply bundling the features into existing subscriptions isn't enough. To deliver ROI, these first-party agents need to produce meaningfully better outcomes than third party AI products or custom-built agentic solutions. That's a difficult task, given the expanding array of alternatives. AI has reawakened the buy vs build debate with enterprise technology. Many marketing ops teams prefer to build their own AI execution agents in Claude and ChatGPT instead of using off-the-shelf solutions. Doing so gives much more control over output, a critical consideration when faced with privacy concerns and the importance of optimising prompts for specific LLMs.

Building agentic solutions using shared models also allows marketing teams to mix AI workflows, traditional automation, and manual processes to fit business needs. It is interesting, therefore, to see Adobe hedge their bets. Adobe Summit also saw the announcement of an MCP integration for the entire Adobe product portfolio and a chat-based interface for Marketo specifically. That will allow existing marketing automation procedures to be AI-enabled without buying into the entire Adobe CX product line.

The Optional Salesforce UI

Salesforce certainly expect their customers to build agentic AI solutions. At their developer conference a few weeks ago, Marc Benioff announced a major architectural change intended to streamline custom app development. Headless 360 is an underwhelming name for a bold vision. Decoupling the Salesforce user interface from the underlying business logic allows any Salesforce workflow to be automated through code, whether or not that's AI-enabled. A headless platform architecture is the starting point for a composable tech stack, with Salesforce positioned as the backend database for any variety of AI agents executing day-to-day business processes. Traditional deterministic integrations benefit from the change too.

In an AI-enabled world, the application user interface becomes less important. Bad UX can be worked around using agentic automation. Instead, it is the application business logic that becomes the key differentiator. Data quality is the key to making an app useful. Salesforce want you to build AI agents using third party tools, just so long as they're processing customer data managed in CRM. Importantly, agents are not a replacement for the Lightning UX. AI doesn't remove the need for manual lead updates. It merely provides another way of managing the same information. Not all pipeline reviews and forecast updates can be automated. Many can be though, removing the kind of data maintenance tasks that sales reps frequently neglect.

Mixing Human & Agentic

The same applies in marketing. Adobe are bringing a conversational interface to Marketo. It doesn't replace the traditional UI. That's getting upgrades too. The chatbot has the breadth of skills expected from a basic Marketo user, such as list imports and program creation. Marketers will be able to create an email newsletter from a prompt, both through the native chatbot or through third-party AI tools. With training, the Adobe AI will also be able to support governance tasks, such as monitoring program naming conventions and fixing badly named smart campaigns. It can't configure the Marketo platform for you though, which means that a UI is still needed.

Integration is becoming ubiquitous. With MCP, any AI agent can create a Salesforce lead or a Marketo email. That is the vision both Salesforce and Adobe are working towards. Yet, even the most innovative organisations still need to create leads manually. Human review processes still require every outbound email to pass through a manual QA step. We remain a long way from the oft-mentioned vision of humans and agents working side-by-side. However, AI has made automation much easier and much more comprehensive. For agentic AI to be truly useful, it must work with the same applications as humans, and it must be able to use the same features within those applications. The impact of that automation on business outcomes then becomes the key measure of technology ROI.

Eloqua Launches New Dynamics Integration

After years of promises, Oracle have finally launched an app-based Dynamics 365 integration for Eloqua. This new controlled availability feature allows Microsoft users to utilise a modern CRM integration similar to the one already available for Salesforce and Oracle Fusion CRM. The new app is currently a controlled availability release, but is strongly encouraged for anyone who needs it.

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