U.S. Software: rAImo's AI Newsletter #113: Headless SaaS Offerings - The Beginning Of The End?

Research evidence excerpt

U.S. Software: rAImo's AI Newsletter #113: Headless SaaS Offerings - The Beginning Of The End?

Equity Research

U.S. Software

8 June 2026

rAImo's AI Newsletter #113:

Headless SaaS Offerings - The

U.S. SoftwareBeginning Of The End?

POSITIVE

Over the past months we have been seeing a growing U.S. Software

Raimo Lenschow, CFAdiscussion around headless as the way forward in modern

applications. The question is whether this is the first step in +1raimo.lenschow@barclays.com212 526 2712

SaaS vendors giving up account control. However, why would BCI, US

CRM push so much for it? We are taking a closer look this Eamon Coughlin

+1 212 526 6142

week. eamon.coughlin@barclays.com

BCI, US

We appreciate your 5-star vote in the 2026 Extel All-America Research Survey in the U.S.

Software category. View our analysts » Vote 5 Stars for Barclays »

A headless application architecture is coming up a lot more in recent months. CRM is specifically

talking about it, but reading in between the lines we can also see some of these notions at SAP

or Workday. At face value, this feels like SaaS vendors giving away some account control as

customers would no longer be forced to use the vendors' user interface (UI). However, then it

feels odd that large players like CRM would actively be pushing for it. Below we take a deeper

look.

What is a headless architecture? Headless architecture is a software design framework that

separates the front-end (UI) from the back-end business logic and data and connects them

through APIs (see Fig 2 below). In this model, the “head” (e.g. the UI layer) is removed (or made

optional), meaning the back-end can store and manage structured data independently while

multiple front-end applications / websites / tools (agents) consume that data when needed.