How Dell’s membrane paved the way for “headless agents”
- In the post-AI world, the entrepreneurial role will be best fulfilled by operating as the kind of fast-moving “membrane” pioneered by Dell Technologies.
- The entrepreneur serves as the connective tissue, translating customer needs into actionable requests for AI agents and suppliers.
- AI-driven agents can adapt to entrepreneurs’ needs across platforms without traditional stand-alone interfaces like websites or apps: hence “headless agents.”
Membrane companies translate customer needs into clear asks for suppliers, ruthlessly re-evaluating their own center of gravity. They disintegrate processes when doing so allows them to move faster, stay closer to their customers, and free up resources for investment in the capabilities that are most differentiating for those customers. Michael Dell, of Dell Technologies, was a pioneer of this kind of virtually integrated membrane organization. In his words, membrane companies prioritize “the compression of time and distance backward into the supply chain and forward to the customer.”
Dell eliminated the traditional dealer channel by selling directly to customers, removing reseller markups, and reducing inventory costs. And rather than attempting to manufacture all their computer components in-house, Dell partnered with specialized manufacturers and focused on selecting the best available components from them. Having blurred the boundaries between suppliers, manufacturers, and end users, Dell was prescient enough to realize that technology could and should be used to achieve the same goals, further shortening the distance between company’s suppliers and their customers because less distance means more intimacy.
In the post-AI world, the entrepreneurial role will be best fulfilled by operating as such a membrane. The entrepreneur serves as the connective tissue, translating customer needs into actionable requests for AI agents and suppliers. While AI handles the day-to-day interactions with customers and suppliers, entrepreneurs focus on bringing a human touch — deciding how problems should be solved, defining company values, and ensuring that the AI agent reflects the right tone and personality.
In this model, AI-driven agents adapt to your needs across platforms. Because they do this without traditional stand-alone interfaces like websites or apps, they’re often called “headless agents.” This may sound a little grizzly, but you’re likely already using them without noticing. Grammarly’s browser extension, for example, seamlessly checks your writing and suggests improvements without making you open a separate app. Giphy, another example, lets you search and share GIFs directly from within your social media and messaging apps.
Looking ahead, such headless agents will increasingly work together behind the scenes to handle tasks for us. Rather than making a restaurant reservation manually through a separate site like OpenTable, your AI assistant could negotiate directly with the restaurant’s AI to book your table. Businesses will build and deploy these headless AI agents to act as digital cofounders, representing the values, tone, and problem-solving approach of their human counterparts.
Entrepreneurs will no longer be constrained by deciding whether their business is an app, website, or service. Instead, their AI agents will seamlessly shift between platforms, interfacing with customers wherever they are. In this headless-agent future, businesses are defined less by their form and more by how well they serve customers’ evolving needs.
AI agents will seamlessly shift between platforms, interfacing with customers wherever they are.
As such, their company-customer relationships will increasingly function the way Application Programming Interfaces currently work. In an API, one system sends a request (input/prompt), and another system provides a response (output/reply). While companies will still need staff, we’re moving toward a world where both people and large language models (LLMs) will be integrated into workflows. Tasks and communications within a company will increasingly be structured as clear prompts and responses, either between humans or between humans and AI agents, in a way that allows for seamless, automated communication. Instead of a human manager assigning tasks and waiting for manual updates from her team, she might prompt an AI, which would respond instantly, providing data and performing tasks, streamlining operations across the board.
As AI agents take over these processes, the role of the entrepreneur evolves from operator to orchestrator. Instead of managing all aspects of the business directly, successful entrepreneurs focus on vision, relationships, and strategic decisions. They let AI handle operations while ensuring technology serves human needs rather than the reverse.
