Matt Biilmann

Matt Biilmann’s agent-economy thesis is expansion, not developer extinction: agentic tools could create the next 100 million software developers. As Squarespace and similar tools lowered the barrier to website creation, and boot camps added roughly 14 million developers at the React layer without eliminating lower layers, tools such as Bolt, Lovable, and Cursor should add another professional layer. “There’ll still be a skill set involved” in deciding what to build and pushing agents to their limits.

“Agent experience” means redesigning products so agents can complete work before their human users perform traditional setup. Netlify’s flow lets an agent create and deploy a site without registration, return a working URL, and offer account claiming or a custom domain afterward. Yet Biilmann insists the endpoint remains human: “I don’t think anyone can have a great developer experience five years from now if they don’t have a great agent experience.”

Generic SaaS faces a credible five-year threat as AI collapses the cost of custom internal software, though the host disputes the breadth and speed of substitution. Biilmann moved from a 10–15-year timeline after seeing Bolt and Lovable advance, expecting budgets could shift from SaaS subscriptions into internal tooling or custom providers. The thesis only works atop zero-operations, serverless, managed components; otherwise maintenance “just overtakes everything.”

Salesforce could lose workflow ownership while retaining an exceptionally valuable position as the system of record beneath agent-built applications. As custom UIs proliferate, durable value may sit where data, permissions, authentication, rules, and auditing live. Biilmann calls reduction to a repository Salesforce’s “big threat,” but warns against underestimating a foundation on which new workflows run.

Chat is an entry point, not the destination, and AI raises rather than removes the premium on differentiated experience and taste. Figma could face an existential threat to its current revenue model if prototyping migrates directly into prompted, working software, but brands still need visual storytelling. Once anyone can clone today’s standardized storefront, winners must create experiences that “guide me and…take me somewhere”—something an empty chat box cannot do.

Biilmann favors open agent ecosystems because builders can swap and combine models, while the host sees formidable closed advantages at Google and Microsoft. Falling training costs, open models, and DeepSeek weakened the case for a few vertically integrated model owners; meanwhile Google’s consumer endpoints, chips, and compute, and Microsoft’s enterprise security remain powerful. Biilmann concedes walled gardens will persist but says their current integrations produce “more bland and worse” experiences.

AI spending should come from labor, development, operations, and maintenance budgets rather than requiring an entirely new wallet. Call centers already demonstrate the shift, with resolution pricing appearing instead of per-seat pricing; Stripe and other zero-operations building blocks could benefit as more custom products and internet businesses emerge. Given Anthropic at $60 billion, OpenAI at $300 billion, and Groq at $50 billion, Biilmann would buy Anthropic and sell Groq; for one public stock over 10 years, he chooses Microsoft.

🔗 Original source & video: 20Product: How to Design and Build Products in a World of Agents | Why AI Will Kill Many SaaS Products | What Products Will Thrive and Die in a World of 100M Developers with Matt Biilmann, Co-Founder and CEO @ Netlify