First Law of Value in the Agentic Era: Proximity to User Intent

Part 1 explores how competitive advantage shifts from owning systems of record to capturing where intent begins and orchestrating work from there. At Dreamforce, Salesforce moved the moat upstream.

This is Part 1 of my new series: “Laws of Value in the Agentic Era.” In the Agentic Era, competitive advantage migrates from owning systems of record to controlling where user intent originates. The closer you are to capturing user goals in natural language, the more valuable you become. Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2025 strategy - securing Slack as an intent gateway and launching Agentforce 360 - illustrates this shift perfectly. But this isn’t just about Salesforce. It’s about an inversion in software architecture: moats now form upstream at intent origin, not downstream at data storage. Whoever orchestrates the work wins; everyone else becomes an API call.

Part 2 will explore the Second Law: Context compounds faster than data and creates defensible memory moats.

Part 3 will explore the Third Law: Workflow integration power.