Process to Intent: The Future of Software

My earlier blogs were me trying to understand myself. But that's only half the story. The other half is the future I'm betting my life on. And I haven't really talked about that yet.

The Future of the World

Where is the world heading? It's something everyone wonders, but for me it's close to an obsession. Doomscrolling to me doesn't mean a combination of tiktok, instagram, and youtube. Now it involves me on twitter and linkedin watching all the startup videos and founders talking threads. I love seeing what people are building because it gives a sense of what the world is becoming.

The more I see the more evident it becomes: the world is moving to a future where "work" we do today won't exist tomorrow. Not because AI replaces people, but because the gap between what we want to do and what actually gets done is collapsing. When you pay attention to the world through that lens, you start to realize most of the work we do today isn't real work.

Work that exists only because systems are too dumb to understand us. Work that exists because data doesn't match across tools. Work that exists because every business is a patchwork of half-connected processes that require a human to constantly translate, adjust, correct, and clean.

I scroll past so many startups building agentic workflows and autonomous systems and it all points to the same direction: the world is collapsing that middle layer of work. The invisible layer that has just been accepted as normal.

The analyst who manually fixes the same errors every month. The ops person who "knows the rules" because the software can't. The consultant that is hired to complete software setup. This is the stuff AI is coming for.

The next decade won't be defined by better tools or AI taking jobs. It'll be defined by the disappearance of tedious work itself. Disappearance of the unnecessary, the repetitive, the "Why do we even do this" tasks that everyone hates to do but businesses rely on to succeed.

We're moving into a world where:

• Workflows configure themselves
• Data validates itself
• Edge cases resolve themselves
• Systems adapt to context on their own
• Humans end up focusing on decisions, not manual day to day execution

You say what you want, and the system makes it real. The shift isn't hype. It's not a bubble. It's already happening in small pieces, and we're only at the beginning.

That's the future that I see when I'm doom scrolling. That's the future we are building towards. And that's the future I will continue writing about.

The Missing Link

Even with all these shifts happening around us, there's one place that hasn't caught up at all: enterprise workflows. And that feels almost ironic.

We have AI models that can summarize books, create apps, generate videos, yet most companies still run on a stack of systems that barely communicate. The future is sprinting, but enterprise operations are still stuck in the 2010s. When you look under the hood of any company, you see the same pattern. Spreadsheets as glue, tickets as communication, approvals as bottlenecks, and humans to interpret.

People don't see it from the outside, but inside every workflow, there's a reality: nothing works unless a human is constantly fixing it. Enterprise software was supposed to standardize everything, but it works counterproductively, creating more layers.

CRM → CPQ → ERP → HRIS → Payroll

Every platform has its own rules, their own timelines, and their own assumptions. None of those systems alone agree with each other. So companies hire people to bridge those gaps. Full operations teams to maintain workflows. Consultants to set up systems. Analysts to reconcile missing or flawed data. They don't hire these people because the work is meaningful, they do it because software they rely on can't understand their business deeply enough to run on its own.

I believe this is the missing link in the future of automation. We've made so many huge leaps in AI capability, but enterprise workflows themselves haven't evolved. They're still rigid, rule-based, manually configured, and break with changes. As long as that's true, businesses can't afford to move at the speed the rest of the world is moving.

The real breakthrough of the next decade isn't going to be "AI that writes more direct emails." It's going to be systems that understand organizations and operations well enough to run without humans acting as the bridge.

The Future of Sales Comp

If there's any workflow that exposes how outdated enterprise systems are. It's sales compensation. It's the perfect example of how something that should be clean, automated, and objective turns into the messiest operational process inside a company.

When I first started digging into comp structures before starting Ryft, I was genuinely stunned by how chaotic it all was. I expected something structured. Standardized. Maybe even boring. Instead, I found a process so tangled that even experienced operators struggle to explain how everything fits together.

Sales compensation is confusing for beginners, confusing for operations, and confusing for leadership. And yet it's also the one workflow where mistakes directly lead to churn, mistrust, and real financial loss. People underestimate how deeply a single payout error can stunt company growth.

Which is exactly why it should be automated.

But it isn't. Comp sits in the worst possible places, in between multiple systems that don't agree with each other.

• CRM → Deals
• CPQ → Quotes
• HRIS → Roles
• Finance/Legal → Rules
• Payroll → Payouts

None of these systems have the whole picture.

Everything falls on humans. Humans manually interpret exceptions, reconcile data, re-run payouts, and explain rules that current software can't understand. The result is a workflow that is held together by humans, even though it's one of the most structurally automatable processes in the entire business.

That's why sales compensation should be one of the first enterprise workflows to completely transform. It's too important, too repetitive, too rule-driven, and too costly to stay manual. The future of this workflow is a system that understands the organizational hierarchy, runs calculations, handles exceptions, and adapts as the business grows.

The Future I Believe In

After spending the last couple months now studying how companies actually operate, I have one belief that I can't seem to shake. The future won't be built on more tools or new tools, it'll be built on removing the need for multiple tools for one process altogether.

I believe we're heading toward a world where systems finally understand the business they're serving. A world where "operations" isn't multiple disconnected software, but intelligent infrastructure that interprets intent and executes on it.

A world where you say what you want, and the system figures out the rest.

I believe software is moving from process-driven to intent-driven. From software needing to be told every rule to just being told the goal. From having to clean data so software can run a program to the software adapts to the data as it comes in. From having to set up software manually to a system that understands enough to set itself up. I firmly believe the future is not about AI replacing people. It's about removing that invisible labor that keeps companies from moving at the speed they want to move.

I believe the next iconic companies won't just be building better software or AI washing. They'll be rebuilding the relationship between humans and operations and fundamentally eliminating humans in operations.

That's the future I see coming. That's the future I'm betting my life on.

How does RYFT fit into that future?

When I think about the future I just described, sales compensation seems like the perfect starting point. It's the first place where this new world actually makes sense.

If you want systems that understand intent, automate logic, resolve edge cases, and adapt in real time, logically, you start with a use-case that's already rule-driven, data dependent and painful enough that companies spend millions on it yearly.

That's sales comp.

Ryft isn't trying to just make spreadsheets prettier or provide better UIs. We're aiming at something much deeper: a system that can actually understand compensation the way a human operator does. Once a system can understand a comp plan: It can execute it, validate it, explain its decisions, adapt as the business grows, and handle exceptions without human babysitting. Most importantly, the system can scale.

Right now our wedge is simple: Use parsing to turn messy compensation logic into structure and automate everything downstream of it with complete trust. The long term vision goes far beyond this initial wedge.

If a system understands incentives, it can understand territories. If it understands territories, it can understand quotas. If it understands quotas, it can understand pipelines. If it understands pipelines, it can understand forecasting.

When you have a system that understands all those layers, you've essentially rebuilt the operations engine of a revenue organization completely void of the manual interpretation humans are forced to do today.

That's the real direction Ryft is building towards.

We're starting with compensation but the goal is much bigger. A world where revenue operations aren't configured or managed, it just runs. A world where revenue leads can focus on growth and not configuring software. A world where companies don't need to hire consultants to make their systems work. A world where leaders can make decisions with clarity. A world where processes become intent.

That's the world I believe is coming. Ryft is how I help build it.