Owning Work Surfaces or Capabilities
Mike Knoop, co-founder of Zapier, on Zapier's LLM-powered future
AI is compressing the middle of software. Thin apps that mainly repackage another tool’s data or actions get squeezed because chat, agents, and workflow builders can now call the underlying capability directly. What remains defensible is either owning the place where work actually happens, like an inbox, CRM, or spreadsheet, or supplying a hard capability inside other products, like Zapier’s action layer and orchestration engine.
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Zapier’s own path shows the capability provider side. It turned 5,000 plus app integrations into a natural language action layer, then into broader agent orchestration, so the product is less a screen users live in and more the system that fetches context, calls tools, and moves outputs across apps.
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The interface side does not disappear, it gets more specific. Mike Knoop points to chat as a good starting point, but a weak end state for repeated work. Wade Foster later describes the winning pattern as interface-less background execution plus purpose built surfaces, like approvals in Slack, dashboards, forms, voice transcripts, or on demand UIs generated for a task.
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A good comparison is Superhuman. It sits on top of Gmail and Outlook, but survives by owning a distinct high speed workflow for heavy email users, not by being a thin integration wrapper. The riskier products are small utilities whose only value is a shortcut that a model, platform, or orchestration layer can now generate inside the main system of record.
The likely end state is software that starts with natural language, then quickly turns into durable interfaces and background agents. More products will look like a mix of invisible automation, human approval checkpoints, and generated mini apps. That favors companies that control a daily work surface or provide trusted execution, data access, and orchestration behind the scenes.