The past few months have been more revealing than any period I can remember in technology. 2026 has made two things undeniable: the ROI of AI is real, the agentic era has arrived, and — perhaps more importantly — your platform and system of record matter more than ever. For serious companies, this was already table stakes in 2025. The ones who got it early are being rewarded now.
Here's what the market is getting wrong though. The conversation has fixated on which model is winning, which agent framework is shipping fastest, which startup just raised. That's the wrong lens. The SaaS landscape has shifted — but the shift isn't about the AI layer. It's about the data layer underneath it.
AI without context is just fast slop. AI with the right context, connected to the right system of record, is a different proposition entirely.
If you've spent any time building with AI this year — writing claude.md files,
wiring up custom MCPs, vibe coding integrations — you'll have learned this lesson the
hard way. Context is everything. The model almost doesn't matter. What matters is what
you feed it and where that data lives.
Which brings me to Salesforce. If you're not already, go spin up a free dev org and connect Claude (or Codex, Cursor — your pick… it'll probably change by next week) to the Salesforce MCP. Vibe coding a CRM sounds reckless until you realise what Salesforce actually gives you out of the box: enterprise-grade security, compliance, permissions, and uptime that you'd spend months — and many, many millions of tokens and limit hits — building from scratch anywhere else. You're not hacking together an unsecured prototype. You're building on infrastructure that the world's largest companies already trust.
Two things have crystallised for me from working in the Salesforce ecosystem over the past year.
1. Slack is where work happens
Where your day starts and ends. Where you collaborate with colleagues, surface updates from Workday, Jira, and Salesforce, and increasingly — where you work with agents. Prep for your next call. Draft your next deck. Pull pipeline data without opening a single tab. Every paid Slack subscription already includes Slackbot, which brings the power of Anthropic natively into your workflow with the context of your connected apps. Most people haven't scratched the surface of what that actually enables. You should.
2. Salesforce is the system of record that makes all of it meaningful
Your customer data, call recordings, opportunity history, account context — it's all there, structured, permissioned, and current. When an agent can reason across that, you're not just saving time. You're making better decisions.
The companies winning with AI right now aren't the ones with the flashiest models. They're the ones who did the boring work of getting their data in order first.