The New Software Stack

The SaaS — as explored in the shift from SaaS to agentic service models — stack was a seven-layer stack designed for humans navigating software. The agentic stack is a fundamentally different architecture designed for machines executing outcomes. This is not an incremental upgrade — it is a structural inversion of where value lives, how it flows, and who captures it.

In the last few days, I’ve given you a view of where this is going next, and it’s not just a passing change; it’s structural.

The critical insight the market keeps missing: the new stack is not primarily about knowledge graphs, data layers, or any single technology. It is about the emergence of a System of Action—an orchestration architecture in which agents understand intent, coordinate across systems, and directly execute outcomes. The entire enterprise technology stack is reorganizing around this new center of gravity.

The SaaS era’s defining architecture was the System of Record — Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, SAP. Static schemas are designed for humans to input, navigate, and extract data. The agentic era’s defining architecture is the System of Action — an intelligent coordination layer where agents consume context, reason about intent, and produce outcomes without requiring humans to operate the software in between.