Tollbooths and Turbines
On a recent analyst call, Workday’s CEO called third-party agents “parasites” getting a “free ride” on their system of record. His solution? A consumption tax…
As Christina Cordova from Linear put it: “The moment a platform starts focusing on how to tax the consumption of its data rather than how to enable better actions, they’ve conceded the future.”
In the AI-era, SaaS companies can choose to be a tollbooth or a turbine.
A toll is a tax. It’s a deliberate “slow” in the system designed to extract value. It treats data as a finite resource to be guarded. A turbine creates momentum. It treats data as fuel. The more agents and workflows spinning around that data, the more energy the entire ecosystem generates.
This is already playing out. Slack turning off its API to “protect” its precious garden and better “tax” usage of the platform.
In the age of AI and coding agents, the moat is not longer the data you sit on, it’s the velocity at which you allow that data to be put to work. I like Slack, but I want my agents to be able to use Slack too. If you put up a big fat tollbooth to slow me down, you’re encouraging me to find a platform that won’t. This is the Tale of Two AI-Cities idea. At a time when it’s never been easier to build software, this is a risky game to be playing.
Hypothesis: if a platform doesn’t allow for “headless composability”, i.e. if an agent can’t reach in, grab a context-rich data point, and execute an action elsewhere without being “taxed” (heavy usage cost, unfair rate limiting) into oblivion, this user will eventually build around you.
Don’t build a tollbooth to tax the “parasites.” Build a turbine to power the future.
