You're just a database! 💽
Why Agents are changing the SaaS UX
Sharing real-world enterprise AI use cases, straight from conversations with early adopters actually deploying AI and enterprise agents. No fluff. Just what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next in AI & Agents for business. 🍺
Dearest Subscribers, yesterday I launched my newsletter and things went absolutely parabolic. This is what folks in the industry call hockey stick growth 📈
Now that I am a certified thought-leader & influencer, I feel a sense of responsibility to bring that hot AI fire. As a thank you, I knew I had to give the people what they want. More content!
For the past two decades, knowledge workers have been trapped in a broken system, feeding databases instead of doing real work.
If you strip away all the complexity, it’s eerily similar to Severance—toiling away in the basement of Lumen, refining data & clicking buttons without fully understanding why. Sounds brutal but it’s not too different (praise Kier) 😂
Looking back at software evolution, databases have always been at the core. In the early days, giants like Oracle & Sun owned the database layer and the industry. Then came the SaaS explosion, which was in many ways, just role-specific databases. Salesforce built the dominant database for sales. Workday and SuccessFactors did the same for HR. SAP & NetSuite for finance. The list goes on.
And for the longest time, interacting with these systems has been a manual grind. Filling out fields. Logging notes. Updating records. Sales reps, for example, spend an inordinate amount of time entering dozens—sometimes hundreds—of data points into a CRM just to make sure leadership has a ledger to report on.
This is low-value work. The kind of tedious, repetitive tasks that eat up productivity.
But that’s changing.
AI is eliminating the worst part of the job.
AI is great a transcription, classification, and summarization. It can take unstructured data—a transcript, an email, a PDF—and upsert it into the right database, without human intervention. This shift is already happening in areas like Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), where invoices, contracts, and forms can be scanned, structured, and entered into systems automatically.
I use a Sales Agent today that listens to every customer call, summarizes it, drafts a follow-up email in my voice, and updates Salesforce for me. That alone saves me 30 to 45 minutes per call. Multiply that by four or five calls a day, and suddenly, AI is reclaiming four to five hours of my time. Not by doing strategic or creative work, but by eliminating the worst part of my job: data entry.
The biggest shift isn’t just automating data entry—it’s how we interact with databases altogether.
For two decades, the way we accessed information inside these systems was through forms, dashboards, and rigid UI elements. Now, we can simply talk or chat with our databases.
My team has an Agent that functions as a chat interface for Salesforce. Instead of clicking through fields and reports, I can just ask:
“What are my top five deals this quarter?”
“Who’s the decision-maker at [Company]?”
“Create a new opportunity for [Company] and assign it to [Rep].”
“Close Win this [Deal]!”
👉There’s a demo of this below if you want to check it out.
This completely changes how knowledge workers interact with data. No more hunting for fields. No more manual queries. Just a simple conversation with an Agent that takes action on your behalf.
Salesforce, Workday, and NetSuite are still just databases. The difference is that Agents now lets us work around them instead of in them.
Of course, these behemoths are aware of this phenomenon, which is why they’re all racing to build their own Agentic ecosystems. But what happen’s when you don’t want to live in their walled garden?
Good luck, to Benioff and team on hiring their army of Sellers to sell you a product marketed to replace the need for hiring Sellers! 🫠
🔗 Dive deeper on this topic
[Blog] - Systems of Context from Scott Brinker
🤖 Enterprise AI use case of the week (Bonus!)
Use case: This Agent acts as chat interface for Salesforce and other databases. Instead of clicking through fields and reports, you interact with the database via chat. It can pull any data or take any action directly from the chat interface.
Who is this for: Operations, Leadership, Sales, GTM
Tools used: SFDC, Tray AI
I started this newsletter because I am frustrated by the lack of tangible Enterprise AI use cases in the market.
I have the opportunity to speak to hundreds of tech and systems leaders and fundamentally believe that AI and Agents will change the way businesses operate. My goal is to help share how.
-Nate G
PS - I went to Regionals in “Power of the Pen” in 8th grade so I consider myself a fairly prolific writer.
That deeper-dive article by Scott Brinker is great. Yours is good, too. ;) Keep the content coming!