You can't solve everything with a chat window

Who needs an interface?

Who needs an interface? Those pesky, cluttered clicking things.

Salesforce doesn't seem to think it needs one any more. And just when you thought there was no other word combination left with "...force", they announced AIforce. (It reminds me a bit of the time Space Force was announced, but I digress.)

AIforce brings Salesforce to wherever you already work: Claude, Slack, or Salesforce itself. I think this is what people mean when they say "SaaS is dead".

Why I'd disagree

I'd actually disagree with that statement.

You can see Claude and other LLMs pulling workflows into their own interface, slowly eating the lunch of Google Slides, Google Docs and other generic applications. That part is real.

But for enterprise software, I think it will remain a mix: using Claude or ChatGPT, and using purpose-built UIs that these assistants can point to through MCP when the job calls for it.

What chat is good at

Chat is brilliant for a question, a one-off, a first draft. "Which workflows touch the sales order?" "Draft the script for this." "Summarize what changed last week." You ask, you get an answer, you move on.

It's much worse at the things enterprise work is actually made of. Seeing four hundred dependencies at once. Getting five people to agree on one change. Keeping a record of who approved what, and why, that still makes sense in a year. Scroll back through a long chat thread looking for the decision someone made on Tuesday and you'll know what I mean.

What purpose-built UIs are for

Purpose-built UIs let you visualize and collaborate around a specific issue in a predefined way. That structure is the point: it increases alignment, helps a team iterate together and speeds up delivery. Everyone is looking at the same picture, in the same shape, and can see when something changes.

That's provided they're designed well. A lot of enterprise software is cluttered, and that clutter is exactly why "just talk to it" sounds so appealing. The answer isn't to throw the interface away. It's to build interfaces worth pointing to.

How we think about it at Splotch

This is how we've built Splotch. You can use it through Claude and the tools you already have: ask a question in chat, get an answer from the map of your account. And when the question gets bigger than a chat window, like a change that touches half your order-to-cash process, you come inside Splotch for the full view, with everyone looking at the same blast radius.

You can't solve everything with a glorified chat interface. But you shouldn't have to leave the chat to find the right one, either.