Kevin Brown

CEO of the game-changing AI-Enabled SmartCRM, Partner Collaboration & Customer Intelligence Platform - LeadSmart Channel Cloud. Co-Host @athpod

[Kevin Brown @LeadSmartCEO]

The jump from chatbots to an army of autonomous agents is across a HUGE chasm that most SMBs will not be ready to cross in the short term or possibly ever.

Software won’t go away, strategic software that manages workflows, builds and embeds the agents, secures the agents, manages the agents and returns ROI with many traditional software outcomes and then becomes a central source of work and truth seems the most viable solution

Never a better time to be a @salesforce #oem partner! Thanks @Benioff and team

[Aaron Levie @levie]

The jump from working with a chatbot to having an agent that actually helps automate a process requires a real amount of work.

Most companies will need to have dedicated people that are responsible for bringing automation to their teams, instead of leaving this up to every individual employee. Partly because the work is more technical than we imagine today, and partly because it’s just hard to do this as a side project.

The job spec is to map out new workflows with agents, implement new systems to deploy agents, make sure the agent has all the right (up to date) context to work with, wiring up internal systems to connect to the agents, creating evals for the agents, figuring out where the human is in the loop, managing the system when there are new upgrades, helping with the change management of the existing business process, and so on.

These jobs may come from IT or engineering, or live directly in the business function itself. They’ll be called different things depending on the company, and in some sense it’s the future of software engineering that you’ll see a huge growth of in non-tech companies.

Most companies will have to be hiring for this now or in the future, and it’s another example of the kind of new jobs that will be created in AI.

[Kevin Brown @LeadSmartCEO]

@Benioff Headless for your API access and BYOUI if you’d like!

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Software going headless is inevitable in a world where agents use the tools 100X more than people do. And the reality is for a lot of software this is actually a huge boon to potential use-cases for these platforms.

Software business models have largely been predicated on selling to the number of seats that are in the company in a given function, and the usage of your software is constrained by how much people can do in a given day. This means that your technology is often vastly underutilized relative to what it actually can power for the customer.

Enter: agents. Agents can work 24/7, run in parallel, and string together work across systems. This is a big deal because now the agent can do far more than people ever could with these tools. Instead of reviewing contracts one by one, the agent will review all of them. Instead of manually moving data between marketing systems and across campaigns, the agent will let you run 10X more of them. Instead of being rate limited in a client onboarding process by human steps, agents accelerate these.

Agents end up using these underlying platforms far more than people ever did, which opens up use-cases that the platform couldn’t go after before.

Now, not every software market has the same amount of positive sum use-cases between people and agents, but I’d argue that a significant portion of systems of record, for instance, can be used far more than they are today. Your Salesforce data can be leveraged 100X more to do vastly more customer targeting and sales automation. Your documents can be turned into structured data and analyzed for insights and knowledge to automate other workflows. And so on.

Now, of course you have to find a way to make this all commercially attractive, but it’s not hard to picture the revenue from API and agent consumption on these platforms becoming a rich component of revenue streams over time. Seats for the people, consumption for the agents. Lots of upside here for the companies that embrace this trend.

[Kevin Brown @LeadSmartCEO]

@levie This seems like a very manageable and viable solution to tech pricing

Prices will be far less for agent access and I’ll go out on a limb and say that there may be a middle layer of reduced access to traditional SaaS and AI for a user who needs less features and access because of what his agents are doing headless

@tomburtonsb thoughts

[Aaron Levie @levie]

As agents become the biggest users of software, then all software has to be available in a headless fashion. Agents won’t be using your UI, they’ll be talking to your APIs.

So the question becomes what is the business model of software and this headless approach in the future?

Here are a few thoughts on how everything plays out based on what we’re seeing and doing at Box, but also conversation with other platforms.

1) Seats don’t go away for *people*. Seats are still a convenient and efficient way to have a customer use technology predictably for a set of users within a baseline set of usage. The key, though, is that when the customer pays for a seat, it has to come with a set of usage of APIs on behalf of that user that the agent can use on their behalf.

The user will need to be able to interact with their data and the underlying tool via any agent they work with, and an embedded amount of usage will come with the seat. I would imagine most software -Box included- will enable seats to work with their data at a relatively high volume via systems like ChatGPT, Codex, Claude, Gemini, Cursor, Copilot, Perplexity, Factory, Cogniton, et al. quite seamlessly. If you don’t do this, you’re DOA.

2) Agents may have “seats” if they are doing stateful work in the system, but they will be priced very differently than people. Seats (or the equivalent) can make sense when you have an agent that has its own workspace, stores its own data, needs a different set of permissions compared to the user, and so on.

If a company wants this agent to be around for long period of time, that may very well look like another “user” in the system. Openclaw-style agents highlight what this future could look like.

The only issue on pricing here is that one customer could decide to do all their work in 1 agent, and another might split it into 1,000 agents. So pricing like a human seat is nearly impossible and impractical; each company will have a different approach for this as it gets tricky perfectly trying to capture all the value within an agent seat.

3) The dominant pricing for headless use that goes above the seat allotment, or when an agent is firmly acting on their own, will be a consumption model. Many enterprises software platforms have previously operated like this with PaaS options, and agents will look like another machine user of their system.

In some cases the APIs might get priced just as they did previously, but in other cases there may need to be new types of APIs that represent the work an agent would do in one go -more akin to an outcome- instead of a series of API calls. This is especially germane when the headless software also has an agentic use-case embedded within in, such as orchestrating the process within their own system via AI.

Overall the growth of this usage pattern is effectively unbounded as the use-cases for agents operating on data in these systems will dramatically exceed what people do with their data and tools today. Every platform that goes headless (which will be anyone that wants to take advantage of agents) will need to adopt a model like this. Some may fight it initially but it’s an inevitably as there will always be more and more agents outside your platform than people.

Overall, there’s a lot of really interesting changes left to come in software due to headless use of these systems. Early days.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

When I talk to enterprises outside of Silicon Valley, most of the use-cases they have in mind with AI are to augment and accelerate how they work, simply because of how much more they can do right now.

Most companies are not satisfied with how much they’re doing, and they’re always constrained by some bottleneck. So they’re looking at processes that are slow and inefficient and wondering if AI can make it so they can ship more product, speed up customer onboarding, better resolve customer issues, more comprehensively understand their customers, and more.

They’re also bringing intelligence to work that would have never been possible to do before. Tech jobs got concentrated in valley and the tech industry, and enterprises or SMBs have not been able to build the products or bring automation to most areas of work. AI lets them do so now. This will be true of many other fields.

And in the areas where there may be some cost cutting, usually that’s in service of funding another area of growth, or it’s temporary. AI cost cutting quickly gets eroded when your competition uses AI to better serve the customer and compete more effectively.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Whether it’s existing consulting firms, new ones that emerge, FDEs from agent vendors, or new internal agent engineering roles, the amount of work that is going to be created to implement agents in enterprises will exceed anything we imagine today.

The complexity of implementing agents in any existing organizations is very real. When I talk to large enterprises, as you move from a chat paradigm to agents that participate in meaningful workflows, there are a number of things they need to do.

First, you have to get agents to be able to talk to your data securely across your systems. In many cases, enterprises have decades of legacy infrastructure that contain the valuable context for AI agents. That’s going to take a ton of work to go modernize and move to systems that work well with agents.

Then, you need to ensure that you’ve implemented agents with the right access controls and entitlements, the right scopes to be safely used, and have ways of monitoring, logging, and securing the work that they do.

Next, you need to actually document the processes in the organization in a way that agents can utilize for doing the work. You also need to figure out what the new workflow looks like when agents and people are working together on a process, and who steps in where. Just replicating the old workflow will mute the gains. Oh and you likely need to create evals for your top new end-state processes.

Finally, you have to keep up with a rapidly changing set of best practices and architectural shifts happening in the agent space. While it’s fun for people to change their personal productivity tools on a dime, it’s 100X harder to do this in a business process. The speed of change is a blessing and a curse right now for anyone trying to keep a stable system design.

All of this means that individuals and companies that develop expertise on the above set of components (and more) are going to be needed to help organizations actually implement agents at scale. This is also the rationale for vertical AI agents right now that can go in deep on a business domain and help bring automation to it.

This is a huge opportunity right now whether you’re doing this internally or as an external business provider.

[Kevin Brown @LeadSmartCEO]

@Jason I’m in

[Kevin Brown @LeadSmartCEO]

👏👏

[Supply Chain Now @_supplychainnow]

Yesterday was the Boston Marathon… and this is what it’s all about. A moment that says everything about people, support, and showing up for each other.

OP: @Officer_Lew
#BostonMarathon #Kindness #Community #Humanity

[Kevin Brown @LeadSmartCEO]

This was a great show with guest Steve Levy from @Infor

[Around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution Podcast @ATHPod]

Steve Levy from @Infor sharing some nuggets with us!
@LeadSmartTech @LeadSmartCEO
https://t.co/ZRH1Y3LLXK

[Around the Horn in Wholesale Distribution Podcast @ATHPod]

Steve Levy from @Infor sharing some nuggets with us!
@LeadSmartTech @LeadSmartCEO
https://t.co/ZRH1Y3LLXK

[Brad Gerstner @altcap]

“I’m building wealth & I can’t even walk yet - boom! All u babies out there - make sure you get signed up!” A new era in capitalism starts July, 4 2026. Nobody left behind. Every child an owner! 🇺🇸🚀@InvestAmerica24 @TrumpAccounts

[Kevin Brown @LeadSmartCEO]

@mikehockett

[Kevin Brown @LeadSmartCEO]

@Jason
Never ever question if @DavidSacks has your back!

Especially when you're skiing and he's doing show solo

[Kevin Brown @LeadSmartCEO]

@expensify - what gives? Missing all of my expense reports from Q4-don't know what I expensed already. Click on the link from emails I sent to accounting and it doesnt show expenses, it says "your work is done here". Yea, but I NEED THE REPORTS!

[Kevin Brown @LeadSmartCEO]

@expensify - HELP - my old reports are not showing up from Q4 - when i click on my own links after submitting them it goes into Expensify and says "your work is done here" but no report there - HELP!

[Kevin Brown @LeadSmartCEO]

As we close out the year, I am grateful for the people, partners, and teams who helped us push forward. Wishing everyone a successful and energized start to 2026. Let us make this our strongest year yet.

[Kevin Brown @LeadSmartCEO]

The channel is changing fast and visibility is now the difference between reacting and leading. LeadSmart Channel Cloud gives distributors and manufacturers the insights they need to move with confidence in a digital first world.

[Kevin Brown @LeadSmartCEO]

If you want 2026 to be a breakthrough year, start by demanding more from your data. LeadSmart turns scattered sales information into clear insight your team can rely on every day.

[Kevin Brown @LeadSmartCEO]

Grateful for the people and partnerships that made this year meaningful. Wishing you a joyful holiday season and a strong start to the new year.

[Kevin Brown @LeadSmartCEO]

Great execution starts with great insight. LeadSmart helps distributors and manufacturers equip their teams with the data they need to understand what is happening and act quickly.