I don't care about your AI agent
What software survives the era of agents?
After just one week of using Claude Cowork to fetch data from Amplitude, update Notion pages, research our Linear projects and draft Slack messages, my laziness has already taken the upper hand. I get immediately frustrated if a tool I need does not connect to Claude and forces me down the long and arduous path of typing a URL into the browser and clicking a hundred buttons just to get to that one page that lets me read or update the datapoint I need.
Oh, the waste of time.
I just want to tell Claude what to look up and what to do.
At Luminovo, we already put a new company-wide guideline in place: Only ever buy tools that connect to Claude. Replace the ones that can't with ones that can.
AI notetaker, I don't care about your AI agent.
Picture this: after any customer call, a seller runs a Claude skill that fetches the transcript from our AI notetaker1, drafts a follow-up email to all participants with a summary and next steps, extracts any questions or feature requests they couldn't speak to in the call and checks Linear, Notion and Slack: maybe the feature is already on our roadmap, maybe someone already answered a similar question. If not, Claude drafts a Slack message in the right product channel to ask. Then it updates all necessary Hubspot properties according to our latest policy.
Sounds great? Well, Claude cannot connect to our notetaker. Without the transcript, my dream of automation, and sipping piña coladas at the beach, falls apart. G-d damn it.
We bought that notetaker—and happily pay 15k EUR a year—because it records and transcribes our calls and dangled shiny new AI features: it can answer questions across all transcripts, give feedback to our sellers and directly update fields in Hubspot. Today, Claude does all of that, does it better and does much more.
All I want from an AI notetaker is for it to
- record, transcribe and store all my calls (video and the transcript)
- make those calls and transcripts filterable, searchable and accessible to whichever central agent also connects to all my other tools
Amplitude, I don't care about your AI agent.
A couple of months ago Amplitude "finally" introduced in-app AI agents to answer questions about our product analytics. I asked our head of product about it and he couldn't care less. Why? Because Amplitude's Claude Connector is so good. It queries all the data you need and generates graphs you can view in Amplitude on the fly.
We'll happily keep paying for Amplitude, because it allows us to store millions of product analytics events and makes them easily accessible to our central agent.
All I want is domain-specific data and actions in the real world
I am willing to replace tools that don't connect to my central agent with tools that do. I don't care about your AI agent; I don't want to click through your UI. So what tools are still worth paying for? What software survives the era of agents?
Two types
- software that makes domain-specific data easily accessible (by collecting, storing and giving you a powerful API to access it)
- software that coordinates actions in the real world
| Tool | Data | Actions |
|---|---|---|
| AI notetaker | transcripts, video recordings | actually join the meeting call and record |
| Hubspot | All sales and customer interactions and metadata | e.g. coordinate email sequences to leads |
| Slack | message history | send messages to coworkers |
| Luminovo | electronics-specific supply chain data (prices, stock levels, compliance data, part alternatives etc.) | negotiate, onboard suppliers, purchase |
Are you still building in-app agents, when you should be building your moat: becoming a system-of-record for proprietary data; connecting your customers to a valuable network?
Maybe it's time to accept that the central agent of most companies, the one coordinating and automating tasks across every tool they use, will be built by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microsoft. Not by you or me.