Inside Copado Headless, DevOps Built for AI Agents

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong TV. A big announcement from our friends at Copado today.

I wanted to bring it to you here, right from the horse's mouth, so to speak, and while it's still fresh. Let me introduce you to Federico Larsen. Federico is the co-founder and CTO over at Copado.

Federico, it's great to have you here on Techstrong TV. How are you? Very good.

Thank you for having me, Alan. It's a pleasure and honor to be here with your audience. My pleasure.

We're going to jump into the announcement, but before we do, especially with a co-founder or founder, I always like to ask to share your story with our audience. Because founding a company is not something one does lightly. It takes a commitment, much like the hog makes a commitment when you want to serve ham.

And let's talk about what drove you to co-found Copado. Sure. So I'm an engineer, as in background.

I've been with Salesforce for almost 21 years, since the early days, since 2005. Very long. Started as a developer, so I've seen the platform now evolving from simple small projects to big enterprise transformations projects.

And it was 14, 15 years ago when, as a contractor with my co-founder, Phillip, we were in this massive project, and we needed to deliver 30 countries in a single Salesforce instance. That was the challenge. The technology wasn't there.

There was nothing on DevOps for Salesforce to do CICD or anything like that. Everything was manual. Some Jenkins open source script, that was it.

And we were set to fail. We were not able to deliver that project unless we either created technology or make up something. 1 during those years.

And by 2013, with the success of that project, delivered on time, on quality, we decided to publish it on the AppExchange. And that's how we got started. Excellent.

I remember those days. Actually, I remember when Copado launched, to tell you the truth, and I remember those days. DevOps for Salesforce, because there was nothing.

And then, people were using Jenkins. People still use Jenkins. I saw a LinkedIn post about can you believe how popular or how widely used Jenkins still is, even in this age of AI and everything else?

Viktor Farcic, who's written books on Jenkins. He- Yes ... made a post about it.

But things have changed over the years, AI being a big piece of it. How's Copado changed? I think we're always trying to deliver the most value to our customers.

I think when AI came into place, there's a whole new way of possibilities how we can drive even more efficiency, more automation, more controls, and more quality assurance to our customers. I think at the end of the day, what we want to do, we want to make good changes in production as soon as possible without breaking it. That's the whole point.

That's how you impact the business. And before AI, it was just deterministic automation. And now with AI, you can help the entire lifecycle, not just building and testing and releasing, but actually you can help with the scoping, with the planning, with the actual coding, authoring the test, authoring the release notes, the onboarding, the release notes.

Everything can be now enhanced and perfect with AI, and I think that has been our journey. I think we comment a little bit those lines, when all this happened, everyone started to add AI features to their platforms, and keep their anchor on their web interfaces, their mobile interfaces for all these SaaS products. And I think the direction where the future is going has no interface.

It's headless. I think that the industry is starting to delegate more control to these agents and open their platforms to be operated by these agents. And these agents, many times can be with a human in the wheel.

Like if you think about Cursor, Claude Code, it's the human on the IDE, but the human is not editing the code in the editor. He's actually talking to the agent on the right hand. Right.

So now the agent is a user. The agent is the main consumer of, or should be the main consumer of SaaS applications if they want to remain relevant. Because I think there will be humans operating the web applications and mobile application, they will be on a decline.

I agree. And you referenced it, but there was this, what was it they call it, Claude Force or something. The integration of Claude into Salesforce.

And it's not just Claude, though. I think this is a trend we're seeing across the board. As you mentioned, headless.

Yeah. Where these agents are free to do what you need them to do. I wrote an article out last week.

My first impressions of working with Astra chat. I instantly knew it was different because the job I gave it, the task I gave it, and it wasn't code, but it was a lot of research. There wasn't a doubt in my mind that this thing was doing it right.

And when it came back with what it came back with, I was amazed at how well-organized and everything. So I think with agents or models like Astra, models like Fable, we have entered now, I'm not saying we have AGI or anything like this. Mm-hmm.

But I'm not smart enough to know if we do or not. But I think we've definitely upped the game of the capabilities. Speaking of that, you guys upped the game today, too, with a big announcement.

Yeah. Tell our audience, if you wouldn't mind, Federico, a little bit about today's announcement. So today we are announcing Copado Headless.

And what that means is, means that we want to be enabling agents to consume our platform without going through our application at all. So the way we do it, we do it in three layers. If we want to go technical, because the audience here is technical.

Yeah. So if you have a good foundation of APIs, and then that API then can be, let's say, organized in CLI verbs that have a specific action on your system, and those CLIs can be even wrapped up in agent skills and MCP servers, then you're giving all the power or capabilities of your platform to an agent acting autonomously or an agent acting through a human. And this is Copado Headless.

All the power that we have built over the last decade and a half in Copado, now bring it into your IDE, into your agent space where you work. And now the developers, I think a lot of the users for Copado Headless will be Salesforce developers. And these Salesforce developers are already working in an authentic IDE, and that authentic IDE now will get supercharged with all the Copado capabilities.

This way, it's not just about building the code, because they can do very fast, but it's about putting that code in production, following the hierarchy of sandboxes, following all the quality gates, and merging them in the right way, so that if you run all your tests and you comply with all the things that you set up in Copado pipelines, you will be able to reach production with the same level of trust as if a human had been building the code. Fair enough. I like your explanation.

We got right down to it. It's headless. But there's a name for this product.

And I didn't hear you say it. If I- Agentia Headless. Agentia Headless, but it's by Copado.

And really, look, not everyone here is technical. We got some marketing, product marketing people. You mentioned it before, Federico, about agents in the loop, agents at the helm, agents at the wheel.

This whole headless thing is, look, we're acknowledging the agent's going to do the work, but there's going to be a human next to that agent who is directing what it is that needs to get done and is hopefully inspecting what gets done before it gets released, or what have you, to make sure that this is, in fact, what we want. And I do think this represents the next, as I said, even before we talked about the announcement, this is the next level. There may be other levels down the road, right?

As I said about AGI and all that, who knows? But this is where we are right now. These agents are able, if we let them, in this headless fashion, to actually go do the work.

Now, Federico, you're a technical person. I'm technical. We know we both have plenty of friends who are saying, "Hold on.

What about security? What about potential problems here? " What do you say to them, Federico?

Yeah, I think that's the other side of the coin, right? You get a lot of intelligence to build code for good, but also you get a lot of power to build code for bad as well. So I think this needs to set a new bar in terms of compliance and security and testing, because now on the other side, you have also these very powerful agents that will try to exploit your solutions.

So I think this is very, very important for all these platforms like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, right? They typically have not been targeted because of opacity or lack of interest. But I think now you don't need to know a lot about ServiceNow, Salesforce, or Workday, right?

This model will find a way to get into those platforms. And I think it's very important that everyone needs to raise the bar because the capabilities on both sides are getting more powerful. Agree.

Specifically with what you've done at Copado around this problem, is there anything you could share around that with us? You mean around security? Yeah.

Around security. Yeah. So, we integrate with the best vendors in terms of security.

We also offer our AI can check your code and provide feedback in terms of security as well. We are partnering with companies to scan your connected apps, to scan your IP ranges, where their agents log in from, how often, what kind of work are they doing with the APIs, and that kind of thing. I think those things are important, and those validations need to shift left, right?

We allow them to run those checks way earlier, before the changes hit production. I think this is a basic principle in DevOps, that the sooner you run all your quality gates and all your tests, the cheaper and the safer it will become down the path, right? And I think with now agents also being released to production, I think it is even more important.

I think we have to, for example, at Copado, we started with CI/CD back in the day. Then we quickly realized that if you deploy automatically, and you're not able to test automatically, you're going to run into a bottleneck, right? So we entered the automated testing space with Copado robotic testing.

And now the game changed again, because now you're not testing deterministic app, you're testing behavior of agents. And I think we have to adapt our testing framework to be able to validate agents. Are they speaking the corporate language?

Are they trustworthy? Are they doing the things they're supposed to do or not doing the things they're not supposed to do? So we had to adapt.

As the evolution of Salesforce and the market is evolving, our platform needs to adapt so that we can meet our customers' requirements. Absolutely. Love it.

You know what, Federico? Let me get it clear. The headless is out right now?

The headless is about to be out. We are technically ready, but it's a marketing decision. I don't know exactly the date, when it's going to be announced, when it's going to be released.

Got it. Sometimes we announce something that says going to be available by this date, or we announce a beta or an alpha program. I don't know.

I am in the technical side of the house. I know we are working on it. People are using it.

We have trusted partners and trusted customers already providing great feedback and loving it. They are loving adding Copado into their Agentic workflows because they make their life so much easier, right? Developers are loving it, and architects are loving it because they can infuse some of the compliance piece of our product to the developers without the developers bothering or having to learn or switching context.

So, with that's kind of the early feedback we have, and that's the part that I control the most. For a particular date, maybe we can have something more around Dreamforce, a more specific date. Excellent.

And Dreamforce, of course, is coming up. You know what? com, you think, and we get the information there?

Yeah. So this is a good question, actually. com, and all the information is going to be there.

Got it. com. That's where we could go.

I got one last question for you. Sitting at your desk in Salesforce in 2005, did you ever think you'd have a day where you're going to have an agent go out and write your code for you and do all of these things that these headless agents can do? I think so.

I think in some cases, we are already doing it. We can instruct the agents, take user story number five, which is, let's say that it's not super complex. Complex in means of integration with other systems and that kind of thing.

But if it is contained and very well scoped, the agent can actually take that user story, build it, test it, validate the intention of the code with intention of the user story business scenario, then write the regression test with our robotic platform against the acceptance criteria of that user story. And once all of that is true, Copado can take that code, put it in Git, run the validations that run on Git and on the pipeline, and start moving to the next environment, to the next environment. And if you instruct the agents to go all the way to production, it can do it.

Probably, enterprises will take it all the way to UAT or pre-prod, and then they batch all the changes after some human intervention. But the agents are capable. It's a matter of trust at this point.

Agree. Federico, thank you so much for coming here on Techstrong TV. Tell us about the new release.

Continued success at Copado. I love what you guys are doing. I love watching how you are, not you, but Copado changes with the market, with the capabilities out there, continue remaining relevant, bringing DevOps and helping developers within the Salesforce and other ecosystems.

Thanks again. We'll have you back on soon. Thank you so much.

It was a pleasure. Federico Lawson, co-founder and CTO at Copado here on Techstrong TV. We're going to take a break.

We'll be right back.