Why Salesforce and Figma Are Placing Opposing Bets on the Future of Apps

Salesforce seems unafraid of a future in which people use an AI chatbot like Claude to access Salesforce enterprise apps and underlying databases to get work done, rather than visiting those apps themselves. Figma, an enterprise design app, naturally wants a different future.

Dylan Field, Figma’s CEO, said Wednesday that as the company’s in-house AI tools for designing apps and other user interfaces get better, “we'll see more and more of that work happening in Figma directly,” rather than using Claude or other prominent AI assistants to do such work.

“We‘ve heard repeatedly from our customers, [AI chatbots are] not where they want to work, it’s not where they want to live, and instead [prefer] starting in your design tool”—in other words, Figma, he said at Goldman Sachs’ technology conference in San Francisco. He didn’t explain why, but Figma users include designers and marketers that work in a heavily visual manner.

Field may not have a choice but to hope AI doesn’t diminish the value of user interfaces. Figma, as a design tool, is arguably more dependent on a future in which people still visit websites. That’s not as big of an issue for Salesforce and other well-established enterprise apps where workers store key data that their AI agents will need to access to automate various tasks.

Field’s comments come during a pessimistic environment for firms like his. Figma’s shares are down 40% this year, and the company said it expects revenue growth to slow in the September quarter. Canva, a Figma rival that is privately held, also has faced new pressures as more people use ChatGPT to do design-related tasks, my colleagues reported.

Figma has been hedging its bets, though, and has made its app accessible to customers using external AI tools. People using Claude and ChatGPT, for instance, can access their Figma accounts and do all kinds of work in Figma through the AI chatbot interface, including handling the structural information underlying designs, such as frames, components, variants. In that case, Figma charges customers partly based on how much they use its service, including the AI chatbots, in addition to a subscription fee.

The early returns on that monetization seemed to prompt Field to say that even if Claude and ChatGPT become the dominant interfaces for doing design work, “I don’t think it’s entirely bearish” for Figma.

But plenty of design work can just be done in the AI chatbots without connecting to Figma or Canva. So these design firms ultimately need to bet that they can hold on to the eyeballs that currently use their services directly.

Seemingly on the other side of this divide is Salesforce, known for its customer management and marketing tools. Salesforce has proclaimed in its own marketing materials that user interfaces such as browsers are optional and it has unveiled a set of tools that let customers use other company’s AI tools such as Claude to connect to Salesforce apps.

“The core idea: no browser required: the API is the UI,” the company said, referring to application programming interfaces that allow people to use such external AI apps to tap Salesforce data for their work.

Why should you ever log into Salesforce again?” Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris said earlier this year.

Salesforce executives say such integrations with AI firms will drive adoption of its software in the long run.

Letting customers use Claude to access Salesforce is “actually increasing the amount of work that's happening through…our CRM [customer relationship management] system,” Salesforce executive Bill Patterson said at the Goldman conference.

Now the challenge for Salesforce and its ilk is to figure out how to charge customers anytime the external AI tools access data stored in the enterprise apps—some of which we covered here—and to prevent customers from yanking such data out of the apps so they don’t need to pay the providers to store them.

Salesforce's smaller rival HubSpot seems to be of two minds about whether people will use its apps.

HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan said at the Goldman event that her company’s customers diverge on the question.

“If I‘m a [marketing] campaign manager, and I have 10 million contacts, and I wanna drive a multi-language, multi-region campaign, I’m going to work in HubSpot all day long,” she said.

But others want to use AI agents: “[I]f I am a CMO, and I‘m preparing for a meeting, and I wanna create an artifact based on the campaign trends…then I’m gonna use one of these [AI] interfaces to actually grab that information.” (An artifact can refer to any sort of output such as a slideshow presentation, illustration, or text summary.)

In fact, more than 350,000 workers have tapped HubSpot apps using external AI tools, she said.

When customers use outside AI agents, “it actually drives better engagement and better retention,” she said.

Palantir and Nvidia Deepen Ties

Both Palantir and Nvidia work closely with Anthropic and OpenAI while also trying to diminish the AI developers’ heft in other ways.

As a result, Palantir and Nvidia are finding new ways to collaborate. Palantir this summer launched software that customers can use to tweak and continuously improve Nvidia’s Nemotron open-source AI models for their specific needs so that they won’t have to rely as much on closed-source models from the two AI leading AI developers.

Now, Nvidia says it is using Palantir’s software internally to manage its supply chain, tracking potential issues and setbacks among its thousands of contract manufacturers that supply components for its AI chip servers.

Executives declined to disclose the size of the deal. (For reference, Palantir’s software can cost large enterprises tens of millions of dollars annually.)

Palantir’s software aims to speed up supply chain analysis that Nvidia employees previously handled manually, often by stitching together information from disparate databases, according to Justin Boitano, Nvidia's vice president of enterprise computing. Nvidia doesn’t plan to reduce its workforce because of the new software, Boitano told me.

Palantir’s forward deployed engineers worked with Nvidia for several months to create the supply chain-related app, which is powered by Nvidia’s Nemotron models.