Major SaaS Platforms Absorb Workflows

Natural language workflow building is likely to become a feature, not a moat. The hard part in automation is not turning plain English into a draft flow, it is owning the connectors, permissions, edge cases, and native product context that make the flow actually run inside Salesforce, HubSpot, Shopify, or a company’s own app. That favors big cloud and SaaS platforms, and it compresses the standalone value of Tray’s Merlin layer unless it stays tied to deeper enterprise integration work.

• Large software platforms already have the main ingredients to ship this themselves. They control the UI where the user works, they know the underlying data model, and they can expose new API endpoints quickly. That lets them generate automations in context instead of sending users into a separate iPaaS product.
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• Native usually wins the head of demand. In workflow tools, the top 10 to 15 integrations often capture most real usage, and those are the ones SaaS vendors have the strongest reason to build first party because setup is smoother and activation is higher. External automation tools still matter for the long tail.
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• Tray still has room where workflows are more complex than simple trigger and action. Enterprise customers need branching logic, data mapping, auth handling, and custom APIs across many systems. That is closer to infrastructure than convenience UI, and it is harder for each SaaS vendor to rebuild from scratch.
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The next phase of automation will split in two. First party platforms will absorb simple AI workflow generation for their own ecosystems, while independents like Tray are pushed toward the deeper cross app orchestration layer that large enterprises still need. That makes product depth, reliability, and enterprise sales execution more important than the novelty of natural language creation itself.