Here Comes (Forward Deployed) Everybody - by Scott Werner

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Here Comes (Forward Deployed) Everybody

Scott Werner<br>May 17, 2026

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Note: I just enabled paid subscriptions for $8/month. Most of these essays will still be free, but I’m working on adding premium features to Artifact Land and launching a hosted version of Conjure among other upcoming products that will come with the subscription. I’m planning on increasing the price to $20/month once these features are launched. So upgrade your subscription now to lock in the intro price.

Ok… picture this… you’re standing at a self-checkout at a grocery store.<br>The screen is yelling at you about an unexpected item in the bagging area. You look down, is the unexpected item the banana? Is it your reusable totes? The machine doesn’t seem to want to give you any hints either way.<br>Behind you, a child is negotiating, in the loudest possible terms, for one of the pouches in their parent’s cart. A barcode is failing to scan for the eleventh time. And there’s one employee overseeing six of these machines like a shepherd whose sheep have all started doing their own taxes.<br>How did we get here?<br>Automated Salesforce Machine

In April 2026, Salesforce announced Headless 360.<br>The pitch, from Marc Benioff: “No browser required. The API is the UI.”<br>You can basically translate this to:<br>we’re no longer going to ship you software. we’re going to ship you the raw materials of software. you can figure out the rest.

If you heard this and shrugged, I don’t blame you. It’s an API. APIs are old. What’s the big deal?<br>The big deal is that Salesforce is the largest enterprise software vendor on earth, and they just told their entire customer base that the part of the product they use most is no longer Salesforce’s job.<br>It is the customer’s job.<br>I don’t think Salesforce is going to be the only time we see this. I see this as a direction of travel announcement. Every major enterprise vendor is going to do some version of this in the next eighteen months. They’re going to call it different things or dress it up in different words. But the shape will be the same: the vendor ships the substrate, and somebody at your company assembles the substrate into something that does work.<br>That somebody is probably going to be you.<br>Unbundling Implementation

Now I know that “the vendor used to do this for you” isn’t the whole story.<br>Implementation labor was always layered across an ecosystem with a thin slice of vendor-paid solutions engineers at the top, a much bigger slice of customer-paid integrators and agencies in the middle, and underneath all of it, a job category. The Salesforce admin. The Design Ops or Marketing Ops Manager. People whose entire role inside your company was to configure another company’s products for you.<br>The customer was always expected to pay for most of the cake.<br>Headless 360 just significantly changes the scope of what the people the customer was already paying are now expected to do.<br>The Salesforce admin role gets re-scoped. What used to be “click through the configuration screens that Salesforce designed for you.” Now has no screens and the admin is wiring together workflows that didn’t exist as a product feature an hour ago using agents, MCP, custom integrations, things that don’t have a Trailhead course yet. And that’s just the people who already had the role.

But to me what this hints at is that every other function in your company is about to need its own version of that role. Marketing needs one. Finance needs one. Legal, ops, support, recruiting, even engineering. Each function uses different software and lives in a different corner of the business, but each one now needs somebody whose job is to translate generic AI capability into something that does work here, specifically.<br>It was easy to name this person’s role when they only existed inside one product. But what do you name the version of them about to exist in every department of every company at once?<br>I don’t know, but I think it means there’s about to be a lot of those people.<br>Enter Colonel Saunders

In 1917, in Memphis, a man named Clarence Saunders opened a store called Piggly Wiggly. (We used to live in much more whimsical times…)<br>Clarence had the wild idea to let you, the customer, walk around and pick your own groceries off the shelves.<br>Before Piggly Wiggly, you had to give a list to a clerk who fetched the things for you. That was the clerk’s entire job. They had everything memorized. They knew where the flour was, intimately, like family.<br>Saunders looked at that beautiful, dignified, fairly-paid clerk and said: “what if the customer just did that part, for free?”<br>And we said: “ok!”<br>We’ve been saying ok for over a hundred years.<br>1917 — customer picks items off the shelf (clerk loses one job)

1970s — barcodes price and inventory the items (clerk loses another)

2000s — customer scans the items themselves (clerk mostly stops existing)

Each wave needed a capability unlock....