Kenny Fraser

My take: in the 1980s and 90s, enterprise software was hostile. If you were in a bank running SAP R/3 or Oracle Financials, the "user interface" was essentially a wall of transaction codes and cryptic fields. You needed weeks of vendor-led training just to process a purchase order. I was (un)lucky enough to work on these systems at the start of my career, and the logic was simple: the system enforced the process, not the other way around. Then came the 2000s and early 2010s: the SaaS wave. Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Atlassian. The pitch was "no training needed." Tabs, dashboards, drag-and-drop: a sales rep could log an opportunity without ever opening a manual. The distribution strategy was friendly UIs that got you into more seats faster (which meant more license revenue.) Now we are entering the third shift. The primary "user" of enterprise systems is no longer the human but the agent. When ServiceNow deploys an AI that can resolve 70% of IT tickets without a technician, or Coupa uses AI to approve a purchase order without procurement touching it, the human is not the driver anymore. The human becomes the reviewer, the exception handler, the escalator. This will fundamentally change the design priorities of enterprise UI. 1) From guidance to arbitration: SAP Fiori was designed to guide a human through a process. The next SAP UI will be designed to explain why an agent made a decision, show the alternatives, and let you reverse it. 2) From efficiency to trust: in the SaaS era, you sold the dream of "fewer clicks." In the AI era, you sell "provable correctness." The winning UI will let a CFO trace an agent's decision down to the transaction level in NetSuite, or let a compliance officer see the logic chain behind an AI's "approve" recommendation. 3) From static workflows to "fluid" handovers: in today's Salesforce, you either follow the opportunity workflow or you don't. In the next Salesforce, you will jump between a deterministic pipeline stage (fully automated) and a free-form agent conversation in the same pane, without losing context or auditability. If you look at history, the vendors who thrive in these transitions are the ones who rebuild the UI logic from scratch for the new reality (not just skin it...) Oracle's 1990s green screens gave way to web-based ERP with PeopleSoft and NetSuite. Microsoft moved from the ribbon in Office to Teams as a work hub. ServiceNow went from ticket forms to workflow canvases. I'm sure there's more... The ones who just wrapped the old UI in a new frame (eg Siebel with "web" Siebel, HP with its ITSM tools) sort of fell off a cliff. In this third shift, the stakes are higher. If you cannot design a UI where a human can interrogate, approve, and overrule AI without breaking the system, you will be replaced by a competitor who can. So, I think next decade of enterprise software will be defined more by how well your UI shows its work than by how fast your AI works.