The SaaS Platform Play of the Decade: Your Agent Economy Advantage

Salesforce unlocked $34 billion in revenue (FY2024) selling a database with forms on top with a new business model - that being SaaS. Now they're about to do it again but this time, the opportunity is 10x bigger.

Sure, lots of competition on the agent front - but Salesforce is building the platform every agent will run on. They're not competing with AI startups. They're collecting rent from all of them with AgentForce.

And you can do the same thing.

Platforms always win

Microsoft didn't fight the mobile revolution. Well, they tried for a bit - but then they became a cloud infrastructure every mobile app runs on. Azure is now their biggest revenue driver - bigger than Windows ever was.

Amazon didn't compete with every online store. They built the platform every store runs on. AWS makes more profit than their entire retail business.

The pattern is - when a new technology creates chaos, build the infrastructure that brings order.

AI agents are creating chaos. You get to bring the order.

Your unfair infrastructure advantage

Here's what every AI startup is discovering the hard way: Agents need exactly what you already provide. Distribution.

• Identity management. Every agent needs to prove who it is.
• Permission systems. Every agent needs to know what it can access.
• Audit trails. Every agent action needs to be logged and tracked.
• Integration layers. Every agent needs to connect to existing systems.
• Compliance frameworks. Every agent needs to operate within regulations - even if those regulations aren’t clear yet.

You've spent decades perfecting these capabilities for humans. Agents need the same systems, just at 100x the scale.

You now get to scale what you already dominate.

This would be your 10x revenue multiplier

Workday manages 70 million humans across their customer base today.

By 2027, those same companies will deploy 700 million AI agents, ten digital workers for every human employee.

Same customers. Same trust relationships. Same enterprise contracts.

But 10x the seats to manage.

Each of those agents needs:

• Identity verification ($3/month)
• Access management ($5/month)
• Performance monitoring ($10/month)
• Compliance reporting ($15/month)

That's not disruption. That's the biggest expansion opportunity in your company's history.

A three layer platform strategy

Layer 1: The Identity Foundation

Your existing user management system becomes the identity layer for the entire agent workforce.

Every AI agent gets registered, authenticated, and tracked through your platform. Just like human employees, but automated.

Revenue opportunity: $5-15 per agent per month for identity and access management.

Layer 2: The Orchestration Engine

Instead of agents calling APIs directly, they route through your platform. You become the nervous system connecting every agent to every system.

This isn't just billing—it's governance, compliance, and optimization at enterprise scale.

Revenue opportunity: $0.01-0.10 per agent action, with millions of actions per day per customer.

Layer 3: The Intelligence Dashboard

Enterprises need to understand what their digital workforce is doing. You provide the visibility, analytics, and control plane.

Think of it as "Manager Tools for AI"—helping humans oversee, direct, and optimize their agent teams.

Revenue opportunity: $25-100 per human manager per month for agent oversight tools.

Companies already doing the right thing

Salesforce launched AgentForce to become the platform where all sales agents operate. They're aiming to orchestrate every B2B transaction in the economy.

Slack announced dedicated workspaces for AI agents (built on AgentForce). That means your bots need licenses too. They're positioning as the communication infrastructure for human-agent collaboration.

Microsoft turned Copilot into an Azure revenue driver. Every AI interaction in Office creates billable cloud consumption.

They're not fighting AI and they’re not saying all their agents will be home-grown - but they're becoming the infrastructure that makes AI possible at enterprise scale.

The trust multiplier effect

We hear from the slower enterprise companies that they will spend the equivalent of $2m in getting products like Slack or Teams approved for internal use in time spent, RFCs, etc.. Two million dollars. For internal comms.

You think they're going to repeat that security review for every AI startup? For every new agent platform?

No. They're eventually going to say: "Use whatever agents you want, but they have to run through our approved platforms."

You have all your audits, certifications - you have their trust and the earned contracts.

Read that again: That's not just a competitive advantage - it’s your extremely defensive moat in the agent economy.

The three-person company of 2027

Here's what Amos Bar-Joseph told us on our podcast: "An autonomous business doesn't have 10 different roles under the go-to-market umbrella. It has only one - revenue creator". In his autonomous business concept, the future company has just three types of people:

• Agent Creators build AI armies to amplify human potential. They're not simple prompt engineers or even context engineers, they're digital workforce architects.
• Product Creators handle development and architecture. They build the systems that agents enhance and humans depend on.
• Revenue Creators own sticky revenue growth. Not sales, not marketing, not customer success but pure revenue creation and expansion.

Your SaaS platform becomes the infrastructure that makes this possible. You're not just serving today's bloated org charts - you're enabling tomorrow's lean, autonomous businesses.

Your platform future as a SaaS company

By 2027, you won't just be a SaaS company. You'll be:

The Operating System for enterprise AI - every agent runs on your infrastructure.

The Control Tower for digital workforces - every agent action gets managed through your systems. Your people will manage multiple agents. Paid has a "control tower" feature to help manage multiple agents from a variety of vendors.

The Revenue Engine for the agent economy - every successful AI deployment expands your platform. Paid can help here too with extensive agentic monetization models.

Yes, you need to disrupt yourself or someone else will disrupt you. Become the infrastructure that defines the next decade of enterprise software.

We're living through a transition right now and you can still act. You already have

everything you need. The trust, the relationships, the infrastructure, the expertise.

You just need to think bigger.

Welcome to the platform play of the decade.

Your agent economy starts now.