Jack Flintoft

The IF-THIS-THEN-THAT era is giving way to an IF-GOAL-THEN-AUTONOMY one.

Zapier fundamentally reshaped how small organizations and individual consumers approach automation. It allowed people without programming skills (including myself) to stitch together workflows across platforms: If (1) someone fills out this form, then  (2) send them an email. Simple, logical chains. I remember using it to automate intake emails, form submissions, even graph creation.

But Zapier is fundamentally about interfacing with other services. It glues APIs together — Google Sheets, Salesforce, Facebook Ads. It enables coordination between services, but it still depends on those external tools.

What if agents usher in a new paradigm where coordination between services is no longer necessary? Where instead, external software isn’t needed at all?

Rather than consumers calling services that call services (case in point: Zapier), we could see users command a centralized agent — or agent platform — that orchestrates sub-agents, each responsible for their own sub-tasks, tools, or goals. (case in point: Relevance AI) In this model, the agent doesn’t just integrate tools — it replaces them.

This shifts automation from trigger-based orchestration to goal-based delegation.

Let’s make it clearer with an example:

Today’s Zapier workflow might look like this:
IF new row in Google Sheets -> THEN send email via Gmail -> THEN post update in Slack.

But an agent-powered version may look like this:
Prompt: “Remind our new subscribers about our product and log interest.”
The agent determines who counts as a new subscriber, how best to contact them, what message to send, and how to track the result — possibly spinning up a temporary sub-agent to handle each component (these sub-agents are the replacements for stuff like Salesforce) .

This is a completely new paradigm. Agents will be orchestrating other agents — not simply calling APIs, but dynamically generating behavior, selecting tools (or even building them), and executing entire workflows without human micromanagement.

And this shift could have surprising consequences.

We might see the rise of a “post-SaaS” world — where enterprise values of today’s SaaS giants shrink, as agents begin to spin up bespoke internal solutions for each company. Why pay for Salesforce if your agent can track, log, and act on customer interactions natively?

Right now, more than 40% of the S&P 500 is made up of “traditional” tech companies. What happens when the value shifts from the services to the systems that coordinate them — or replace them entirely?

What would this agent democracy look like? … 

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Update 9/Jul/25: After some clarity from the Den guys (s/o Linus), I realize that there will likely still be external apps (like Notion, Cursor, etc.) but that these softwares will be transformed into agents (as is already happening). Maybe the value here accrues to a player who owns the horizontal control of these …