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.
随着 agent 成为软件最大的使用者，所有软件都必须能以 headless（无界面）方式提供。agent 不会使用你的 UI，它们会与你的 API 对话。所以问题就变成了：未来软件以及这种 headless 方式的商业模式会是什么？基于我们在 Box 看到和正在做的事情，以及与其他平台的交流，下面是我对事情将如何发展的几点看法。1）面向*人*的 seat 不会消失。对于让客户在一组基线使用量范围内、以可预测的方式让一组用户使用技术而言，seat 仍然是一种方便且高效的方式。不过关键在于：当客户为一个 seat 付费时，它必须附带一组代表该用户进行 API 使用的额度，供 agent 代其使用。用户需要能够通过他们合作的任何 agent 与自己的数据和底层工具交互，而 seat 中也会包含一部分内嵌的使用量。我猜想大多数软件——包括 Box——都会让 seat 能够通过 ChatGPT、Codex、Claude、Gemini、Cursor、Copilot、Perplexity、Factory、Cogniton 等系统，以相对高的吞吐量、几乎无缝地处理其数据。如果你不这么做，你就是 DOA。2）如果 agent 在系统中执行的是 stateful（有状态）工作，那么它们也可能会有“seat”，但其定价方式会与人非常不同。当一个 agent 拥有自己的 workspace、存储自己的数据、需要与用户不同的一组权限等等时，seat（或等价形式）是有意义的。如果一家公司希望这个 agent 长期存在，那它很可能就会看起来像系统中的另一个“user”。Openclaw 风格的 agent 突出了这种未来可能的样子。这里定价上的唯一问题在于：一个客户可能决定把所有工作都放进 1 个 agent，另一个客户则可能拆分成 1,000 个 agent。所以像人类 seat 那样定价几乎不可能，也不切实际；随着要准确捕捉一个 agent seat 中的全部价值变得棘手，每家公司都会对此采取不同做法。3）对于超出 seat 配额的 headless 使用，或者当 agent 明确地在自主行动时，占主导地位的定价将会是 consumption（按量消费）模型。许多企业软件平台此前已经通过 PaaS 选项这样运作，而 agent 看起来会像它们系统中的另一类机器用户。在某些情况下，API 的定价方式可能与以前一样，但在另一些情况下，可能需要新的 API 类型，用来表示 agent 一次性完成的工作——更接近某种 outcome（结果）——而不是一连串 API 调用。当 headless 软件本身还内嵌了 agentic（代理式）使用场景时，这一点尤其贴切，比如通过 AI 在其自身系统内编排流程。总体而言，这种使用模式的增长实际上是无上限的，因为 agent 在这些系统中基于数据进行操作的使用场景，将会大幅超出今天人们对其数据和工具的使用方式。每一个走向 headless 的平台（也就是任何想利用 agent 的平台）都需要采用类似这样的模型。有些平台起初可能会抗拒，但这是不可避免的，因为你的平台之外的 agent 数量总会越来越多，超过人。总的来说，由于这些系统的 headless 使用，软件领域还会出现许多非常有意思的变化。现在还只是早期。