C-Suite-as-a-Service: When Business Capabilities Become Subscribable

2 days ago
4 min read

Warwick Brown explores the shift toward "C-Suite-as-a-Service," where AI agents transform business functions into subscribable, API-driven capabilities that act, learn, and scale on demand

By: Warwick Brown

For thirty years, software asked us to adapt. We learned the interfaces, managed the logins, and became the unpaid middleware between applications that refused to talk to each other. That arrangement is inverting. Software is beginning to adapt to us, through agents acting on our behalf.

The shift is well documented. McKinsey's 2025 State of AI survey found 62 per cent of organisations are at least experimenting with AI agents. Gartner projects 40 per cent of enterprise applications will include task-specific agents by the end of 2026. IDC forecasts AI-related spending reaching $1.3 trillion by 2029, with agentic AI dominating the growth. The adoption curve is steep and accelerating.

But most commentary stops at the operational layer: agents handling tasks, streamlining workflows, augmenting teams. The more consequential question is what happens when agents stop supporting business functions and start representing them.

The Logic Is Already There

Every significant platform now exposes its capabilities through APIs. Payments, logistics, identity, communications, storage: all callable, composable, programmable. Postman's 2025 report found 83 per cent of organisations have adopted API-first development, yet only 24 per cent design their APIs with AI agents in mind. That gap is the bottleneck. An agent is only as capable as the services it can call.

Meanwhile, McKinsey has mapped three interaction models for agentic commerce: agent-to-site, agent-to-agent, and brokered agent-to-site. Protocols from Google, Stripe and others are formalising the infrastructure. Visa, Mastercard, Shopify and Amazon are building rails for agents to transact autonomously within delegated authority.

The building blocks exist. The question is what gets built on top of them.

C-Suite-as-a-Service

Consider pre-built suites of specialised agents, each designed to own a business function end-to-end.

A virtual CFO that models scenarios, monitors cash flow, flags liquidity risks, and generates board-ready reporting. A virtual CMO that tests campaigns across channels, allocates spend against performance data, and adjusts creative in real time. A virtual COO that optimises supply chains, manages vendor relationships, and surfaces bottlenecks before they cascade.

You subscribe. You integrate via APIs. You set guardrails: spending limits, escalation thresholds, compliance boundaries. The agents operate. They escalate only what genuinely requires human judgement.

This is not replacing executives. It is making executive-grade operational intelligence accessible to organisations that could never afford a full C-suite, or extending the reach of executives who are already stretched across too many competing priorities.

A founder with a strong product and limited capital can subscribe to CFO, CMO and COO capabilities the way they currently subscribe to accounting software or a CRM. The difference is that these services do not just store data and present dashboards. They act. They decide within parameters. They learn.

Business-as-a-Service

Push the logic one step further.

Your agent calls another organisation's business API to spin up a full capability: a marketing engine, a logistics network, a product development pod. Discovery happens agent-to-agent. Negotiation of pricing, SLAs, intellectual property terms and compliance requirements happens within policy constraints you have set. Execution is coordinated between your agents and theirs.

Gartner projects agentic AI could drive 30 per cent of enterprise application software revenue by 2035, exceeding $450 billion. That number suggests something bigger than efficiency gains. It points to a structural shift in how business capabilities are discovered, composed and delivered.

If organisations can be assembled from human and digital services on demand, "the company" stops being a fixed entity. It becomes a temporary composition, orchestrated by intent, scaled up or down as conditions change.

What This Means (and What Could Go Wrong)

Three things I think need to be said clearly.

First, governance is not optional. Agents that can negotiate contracts, adjust pricing and allocate capital need hard boundaries. My position: no agent should execute irreversible decisions without a human checkpoint. The technology exists to enforce this. The question is whether organisations will implement it voluntarily or wait for regulation to compel them.

KPMG's governance framework and McKinsey's security playbook both make this point, though I would go further: governance should be designed into the agent architecture from inception, not bolted on after deployment.

Second, access determines who benefits. Sophisticated agentic capabilities will be expensive initially. If C-Suite-as-a-Service remains accessible only to well-funded organisations, it widens the gap between those who can field digital workforces and those left wrestling legacy systems. The democratisation argument only holds if pricing and access evolve quickly enough to reach small and mid-market organisations.

Third, we need to think carefully about what "human in the loop" means when the loop runs at machine speed. Rubber-stamping outputs you do not understand is not oversight. It is theatre. Genuine human governance requires that agents surface their reasoning in ways humans can interrogate, not just their conclusions.

The Question Worth Asking

If business capabilities become subscribable by API, orchestrated by agents, and composable on demand, who gets to build a company? Who gets to compete? And what happens to the organisational structures we have spent a century optimising around the assumption that capability requires headcount?

These are not questions for 2030. The infrastructure is forming now. The leaders who engage with them honestly will have a hand in shaping the answers.