Bret Taylor: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Oh, yeah. He's different. And he has the capacity to raise billions in capital and my guess is most of your other listeners don't, and then he is the greatest of all time for reason and he's different. You don't compare yourself to him. The other part of the market is the tooling, and I think there's a lot of folks selling pickaxes in the Gold Rush. This is data labeling, services. This is data platforms, it's eval tools. More specialized models like 11 Labs has a great set of voice models that a lot of companies use that are really high quality and it's like if you're trying to be successful in AI, what are the different tools and services that you need? There is some risk to the tooling market because it's pretty close to the sun. So, if you look at the infrastructure as a service market and the cloud tooling market like the Confluent and Databricks and Snowflake, a lot of the Amazon and Azure and others have competing products in those areas because they're very adjacent to the infrastructure itself and every infrastructure provider is trying to differentiate by moving up the stack and you're right there. So, there's some real meaningful companies as I mentioned, like Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent and others, but there's a lot of others that were obviated by technology from the infrastructure providers themselves. So those companies probably are the most at risk for a developer day from one of these big foundation model companies releasing exactly what they do. So there's probably a lot of people who need your tool, but the question will be if or when is probably the right way to think about it, one of these large infrastructure providers introduces a competitor, why will people continue to choose you? So it's a good market but it's a little bit close to the end as I said. Then there's the applied AI market. I think this will play out for companies who build agents. I think agent is the new app. I think that's going to be the product form factor. There's companies like Sierra, we help companies build agents to answer the phone or answer the chat for customer experience and customer service. There's companies like Harvey that make agents for both a legal, paralegal profession, anti-trust reviews, reviewing contracts etc, etc. There's companies that do content marketing. There's companies that do supply chain analysis. I think this is like the software as a service market. They'll probably be higher margin companies because you're selling something that achieves a business outcome as opposed to being a byproduct of the models themselves. They will almost certainly pay taxes down to the model providers, which is why those model providers will end up extremely large scale but probably slightly lower margin and I think the market for them will be probably less technical. If you think about the purest form of software as a service, it's not like you ask what database do you use? It's really about the feature and function. arket for them will be probably less technical. If you think about the purest form of software as a service, it's not like you ask what database do you use? It's really about the feature and function. I think that's where agents will go. I think it's going to be more about product than it is about technology over time. Just going back to my metaphor, in 1998 when Mark and Parker started Salesforce, just getting that database running in the cloud was like a technical achievement. Nowadays, no one asks about that because you can just spin up a database in AWS or Azure and it's like no problem. I think today, orchestrating an agentic process on top of the models, sounds really fancy and it's really hard and all that stuff. I'm pretty sure that's going to be easy in three or four years. It's just like just as the technology improves. And so, over time you say, what is an agent company? Well, it looks a little bit like [inaudible 00:57:30] as a service. You talk a little bit less about how you deal with the models in the same way modern SaaS, few people ask what database you use, but you'll probably ask a lot about the workflows and what business outcomes that you're driving. Are you generating leads for a sales team? Are you minimizing your procurement spend? Whatever value you're providing, it's going to slowly evolve towards that. I'm very excited. I don't think startups should probably build foundation models. But you can shoot your shot if you have a vision for the future, go for it. But I think it's probably a challenging market that's already consolidated. I'm very excited about the other two markets. I'm particularly excited as building agents becomes easier, to see a lot of long tail agent companies come out. I was looking at a website for the top 50 software companies in the stock market and obviously, the top five are the big, big boom ones like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, all that, but the next 50 are all SaaS companies and some of them are very exciting, some of them are super boring, but this is how the software market has evolved and I think we're going to see something similar with agents. It's not just going to be these huge markets like we're in customer service and software engineering. It's going to be a lot of things where people are spending a lot of time and resources that an agent can just solve, but it requires an entrepreneur who actually understands that business problem, and deeply, and I think that's where a lot of the value is going to be unlocked in the AI market. That is incredibly helpful. This makes me think about, I had Marc Benioff on the podcast, you guys were co-CEOs and he was extremely agent-pilled. All he wanted to talk about was Agentforce. Clearly you're also very agent-pilled. What is it that-…

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