Is ZOOM coming for Salesforce?

Good morning Predictable Revenue community,

Today’s email is a little longer than usual because it covers a question that’s been stuck in my head. I thought that laying out my thinking might be an interesting exercise to help you think big picture about your startup. It’s easy to get stuck in the day to day of interviewing customers, building features, and responding to fires and forget to pull your head out and stare off into the distance. That’s what today’s email is about. I promise to get back to tactical sales / revenue / product market fit topics next week.

Also, do me a favour and let me know what you think about these longer posts. Love ‘em / hate ‘em? Hit reply and let me know.

Before I get to the newsletter, this is your last call for the February Founder Revenue Meetup, I’ve opened it up to any founder under $1m ARR, and it’s happening next Friday @ 930am PT / 1230pm ET. No cost to join, this is something I’m doing to give back to the community of folks that have helped me with the book.

Here’s the post.

I was reading Good Strategy/Bad Strategy a few years ago, and it posed an interesting exercise: pick a company that’s dominant in its industry and ask, “What would have to be true for that company to lose its dominant spot?”

Naturally, I thought of Salesforce. I’ve been knee-deep in AI lately—using tools like GPT’s Deep Research to do some fact-checking and research for this newsletter—and it got me thinking about them again. Specifically, will AI be the next generational leap in how we interact with software, or will it remain in a supporting role behind the scenes? Depending on which way that coin lands, we could be looking at the biggest shift in “systems of record” (like CRM, ERP, or Accounting) we’ve seen since Salesforce rose to power.

History First

Oracle built its empire as the go-to relational database vendor. They monetized the fact that if you wanted to store, manage, and query large amounts of enterprise data—especially for things like ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems—you needed an Oracle database. Licensing those databases and the associated support was their cash cow.

Salesforce took that foundation (i.e., a database for storing customer information) and elevated it with an accessible graphical user interface (GUI) and standardized processes for customer relationship management. Instead of forcing companies to learn SQL or hire expensive DBAs, Salesforce let you manage contacts, track deals, and generate reports by pointing and clicking. They simplified who could use a system of record and opened the door for non-technical teams to manage their own data. Now you just have to hire expensive SFAs…

Then, Salesforce stacked on some counter-positioning: instead of having to buy your own servers and run your own systems, you could rent a small slice of their server for a low monthly cost. Suddenly, every sales manager or VP could get real time dashboards and reports without knowing what SQL stood for and the SaaS industry was born.

Salesforce leveraged two key factors to surpass Oracle, at least in the CRM business, a generational leap in the UI and a new business model that would be unprofitable for Oracle to copy.

The New Oracle

What would it take for Salesforce to become Oracle? I’m not suggesting that Salesforce will suddenly stop growing or even making great products. After all, Oracle remains a huge, profitable powerhouse. It’s a staple enterprise player, but not the unstoppable force it was in the 90s and early 2000s. Today, if someone is talking about “enterprise software,” you’re more likely to think of Workday or Salesforce than Oracle.

So how could Salesforce, the CRM giant, slip into the same position Oracle finds itself in today—profitable, relevant, but no longer seen as the cutting edge of enterprise solutions? Below is a look at why Salesforce might face that future and where the next wave of disruption could come from, especially with AI in the spotlight.

Is AI the new UI?

Salesforce made its name by offering a great UI atop a database. But if AI really is the next generation of software interaction, we might see something far more radical—something that shifts focus away from the user meticulously clicking around, to the system doing most of the work on its own.

Everyone knows the pain of manual data entry in CRMs. Sales managers solve it with systems, processes and reviews while salespeople simply try to avoid it. Salesforce has tried to solve it with things like Einstein and various integrations, but the average user still has to “use the software” in a hands-on way. Most reps I talk to still have to manually update fields or mark deals as advanced. I haven’t personally encountered anyone who’s letting Einstein automatically update opportunity statuses without a human in the loop.

It feels like we’re close to that AI-driven future—yet it’s not here. Maybe Salesforce is technically capable but not fully committing. Or maybe the barrier is that going truly automatic would mean blowing up the old approach: letting AI do 90% of the grunt work while the human just approves final steps would be a major shift to Salesforce’s model and one that users certainly would rebel against. It took me years and Salesforce nearly mandating it to get me to convert from Classic to Lightning, and I’m a pretty savvy user. Imagine how the average user would feel if suddenly their pipeline was updating itself?

From “No Software” to “No UI”?

Salesforce famously launched with the motto “No Software.” They wanted to differentiate from the old on-prem install model. Maybe the next generation of CRMs will come along and say “No UI”: if the AI can gather, interpret, and file information automatically, the user barely needs to look at a screen.

Don’t expect Salesforce’s interface for sales reps to vanish anytime soon. But the work that goes into making sure all those records and fields are kept updated? That might be where the real battleground lies. If a new AI-first platform can handle that job seamlessly, it could be a game-changer.

The very thing that made Salesforce brilliant—its powerful, customizable interface—might be what holds it back. After all, the bulk of Salesforce’s revenue comes from retention and, just like Oracle, they are likely to be hesitant to rock the boat too much with existing users. This means adopting a radical new “No UI” approach—agents that use the software for you—might be too extreme an idea to get off the ground within the Salesforce ecosystem. 

Switching Costs

One big reason Salesforce has maintained its edge is what Hamilton Helmer’s book 7 Powers refers to as Switching Costs. It’s not just about monthly fees; it’s the sheer complexity and expense of uprooting a system that’s woven into every facet of a business. Teams would need to migrate massive datasets, rebuild integrations with countless third-party tools, and retrain employees who’ve spent years learning the Salesforce workflow.

Add in the army of consultants, integrators, and developers out there whose entire businesses revolve around customizing Salesforce, and you start to see why many companies opt to just stay put. In other words, companies don’t just buy Salesforce—they buy into an ecosystem. And after you’ve spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours fine-tuning it, switching feels like an even bigger gamble than staying.

On top of that, Salesforce’s acquisitions (like Traction on Demand) signal that it’s ready to double down on its own complexity—offering more services to help you handle, well, more Salesforce. Would Salesforce really risk upsetting users, disrupting their own model, and cannibalizing that lucrative service revenue by rolling out an almost invisible AI layer that sets itself up in the background? That’s a huge cultural and financial leap.

ZOOM Has Entered the Chat

If AI truly becomes the main way work is done in a CRM, the fuel for that AI will be meetings and emails—the two biggest communication channels in most organizations.

Google and Microsoft dominate email. It’s always surprised me that Google hasn’t launched a serious CRM competitor, but hey, never say never. Zoom effectively owns video meetings, especially in SMB and mid-market sales cycles. They have the calls, the transcripts, and the raw conversation data. That’s gold for training an AI that can update your CRM automatically.

Salesforce does have mountains of data, but it’s siloed across hundreds of thousands of instances. Zoom’s data, on the other hand, is singular in format and (theoretically) more standardized. If Zoom wanted to build an AI that updates deals and pipeline stages on the fly, they might be able to do it with a level of data uniformity Salesforce can’t match. I’m not sure if Zoom would want to go that direction but their recent changes to the window I routinely close without looking at after my meeting suggest they might be thinking about it. 

New Model: Self-Implementing Software 

If this “no UI” AI approach takes off, then adopting your next CRM might be as easy as syncing your email, calendar, and call recordings. The AI does the rest. You could theoretically even sync it to Salesforce itself and let the AI replicate or improve your setup in parallel. That alone chips away at Salesforce’s lock-in; if migrating from (or augmenting) Salesforce is that painless, why not shop around?

A new entrant could also offer highly competitive pricing, because after all, if “setup” basically comes down to AI processing time, they don’t need the same army of consultants or the same overhead. Sure, large language models aren’t cheap to run right now. But costs are dropping fast, and open-source models (like Llama and Deepseek) are accelerating that trend. If the cost of training and inference keeps dropping, the AI-driven “no UI” model starts to look more feasible—and potentially more profitable for a newcomer willing to undercut Salesforce’s pricing.

Final Thoughts

Will Salesforce make the leap to this brave new world of minimal manual data entry and near-invisible UI? Or will a competitor outflank them by offering a “no UI” experience that automates everything behind the scenes?

It’s hard to say. But if the past is any guide, the thing that made Salesforce such a juggernaut—a good enough UI and a deep ecosystem—might be exactly what holds them back from embracing a future where the UI is almost an afterthought. And if a new platform truly does figure out how to sync your calls, your emails, and all your key data sources into a self-assembling CRM, it could chip away at the safe bet that is Salesforce—just like Salesforce once chipped away at Oracle.

A lot hinges on how AI evolves, who controls the most valuable data streams, and whether Salesforce is willing to upend its own business model. No matter what, if “no UI” is the next big wave, the “no software” message from 20 years ago might sound just as old-school as installing Oracle on tapes.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your take—could Salesforce become the next Oracle, or will it ride the AI wave and keep dominating? Hit me back here. 

Stay curious, and maybe keep an eye on Zoom…

Collin 

PS - last reminder for next week’s Founder Revenue meetup, Friday at 930am PT / 1230pm ET, hit reply if you’d like to join. Feel free to forward this to anyone that you think might need a little extra support. Every week, we pick two people and do a deep dive on a revenue problem they’re struggling with.