Why Salesforce must die, pt.1
In the coming wave of AI startups, companies like Salesforce have a huge cross on their back.
At nearly $35 billion in annual revenue, you might argue that its sheer size makes it unassailable. It has the resources and data to make AI an integral part of its offering. It’s investing heavily in its AI product Einstein, for example.
But it is not an AI-first company. It’s not even primarily a product-first company. Anecdotally, I know of very few people who like Salesforce as a product. Instead, it’s wearily accepted as a ‘necessity’.
It’s a gigantic one-stop-shop CRM platform that is so big and so integrated into companies’ workflows, that a lot of its value derives simply from the fact that it’s the place where everyone does everything - even if it doesn’t do those things particularly well.
If you’re a large enterprise, you may already be paying six- or seven-figure licensing fees. But want a more customised Salesforce to help your company achieve its goals? You’re going to need Salesforce engineers, Salesforce project managers, Salesforce architects.
Like all software, it’s expensive, but it can do almost anything you want. Unlike most software, all the money you’re investing helps build and sustain the Salesforce ecosystem. It’s not generic. The optionality is tightly constrained.
In effect, a huge economic driver of Salesforce’s value is precisely that it is hard to change.
This is a pain for most enterprises but an incredible business for Salesforce— right until it’s not.
Tomorrow: the inevitable demise of Salesforce.
Inspired in part by ’s excellent pieces on AI-first startups.
All CRM integration is recommended and insisted on as a necessity at some point in a startup's lifecycle to manage its existing data better.
However, low code, no code options tend not to be easy to understand or misuse. I wonder if AI first is actually solving that issue.
I remember reading a post by someone who started a new business swearing never to use Salesforce again and then he was using it again because it's impossible to avoid at a certain scale. But yes, it's not an AI-first company. It's a giant of the current age, not of the next one. Although, giants die slowly, just ask IBM :)