Bharath Balasubramanian, Director of Product Management, AppExchange at Salesforce.
Over the last few months, I’ve been talking to a lot of founders building AI-native products. Most of those conversations start in the same place: Should we go direct to customers, or should we build on a platform and use it for distribution?
A couple of years ago, that decision was easy. Go direct so you keep your margin and own the relationship.
But we’re now in the middle of something I don’t think we’ve seen before—a coordinated land grab by the major platforms for AI-native builders.
And if you’re an independent software vendor (ISV), that changes the calculus and opens up a new vision of opportunity.
The Platform Land Grab Is Real
There’s a clear pattern emerging across enterprise software and cloud platform providers, such as Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft, ServiceNow and Adobe. They’re all investing heavily in three areas at the same time.
First, production-grade developer tooling for agents. Over the last six to eight months, every major platform has rolled out frameworks, SDKs and environments that make it faster to build.
Second, a managed back office. Billing, provisioning, compliance, private offers, co-sell motions—things that used to take years for an ISV to stitch together are now bundled into the platform on day one.
Third, and most important, access to a captive base of enterprise buyers. These customers are already operating inside flagship applications and are desperate to fill real gaps, which smaller companies can fill. There is already close to $470 billion in committed cloud spend parked with AWS, Microsoft and Google, and Omdia projects enterprise software sales through hyperscale marketplaces will reach $163 billion by 2030, at a 29.1% CAGR
Taken together, and you start to see what’s happening. Platforms are moving away from just enabling ecosystems. They are actively competing to attract the next generation of AI-native companies to build and distribute on top of them.
Why Going It Alone Is Getting Harder
At the same time, the environment for independent distribution has changed.
More builders are entering the market, creating more supply than demand in many categories. But not everything being built is useful. Customers have to sift through the noise and cycle through options to find what works.
That has a downstream effect on how products get discovered. Increasingly, it’s not a human browsing a website. It’s an AI agent reasoning about intent and looking for solutions in structured, machine-readable environments. Discoverability, which used to be a marketing problem, has become a systems problem.
On top of that, there’s everything that sits outside the product itself, such as security reviews, pricing models, billing, compliance and integrations into existing workflows. For a small team, that can quickly become the majority of the work.
Platforms are stepping in to absorb that complexity. And right now, they’re doing it aggressively because they want builders on their side of the ecosystem.
Choosing Where To Place Your Bet
One thing I’ve seen is that not every platform fits every ISV.
The instinct is often to go with the biggest platform. But size alone doesn’t determine fit. What matters more is whether the platform owns the customer moment your product is trying to serve.
If your product lives inside a specific workflow, that’s where you need to be. That’s where customers already are, and that’s where discovery happens: More than 90% of Salesforce customers run at least one AppExchange app.
There’s also a technical layer to consider. In the agentic era, platforms that expose capabilities programmatically and make it easier for agents to interact have an advantage. That reduces the integration burden on the ISV.
Commerce maturity shows up quickly as well. If the platform handles billing, private offers and provisioning cleanly, it removes friction from the buying process. That has a direct impact on conversion.
What I’ve seen work is going deep on one platform and maintaining a lighter presence elsewhere. Early traction tends to come from depth, not breadth.
Why Native Wins
After a platform is chosen, the next decision is how to build.
It’s tempting to stay platform-agnostic and distribute everywhere. That gives you coverage, but it doesn’t always give you advantage.
Products that are built natively on a platform tend to show up differently. They integrate more naturally into workflows, they rank better in discovery and they align with how customers are already operating.
Customers themselves are also consolidating around these environments. They’re building their own agents, extending workflows and solving problems internally. When they go outside for solutions, they prefer something that fits cleanly into that system.
Even the way products are described is changing. Listings need to be structured, detailed and rich in context because AI agents (not humans) are interpreting them. The more clearly a product expresses its capabilities, the easier it is to match it to intent.
This Window Won’t Stay Open Forever
What stands out to me right now is how aligned the platforms are in trying to attract builders.
They’re offering tooling, distribution and, in many cases, capital. That combination doesn’t happen often and it won’t last indefinitely. At some point, the ecosystem will mature. The number of viable solutions will stabilize and the level of investment will change.
Right now, the opportunity for ISVs is to pick a platform, go deep and let it carry the parts of the business that don’t differentiate you. That frees you up to focus on how your specific product can find real traction with customers.
The land grab is happening now. And the builders who commit early are the ones who will show up where the customers already are, while everyone else is still trying to get discovered.
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