Marc Andreessen says “Software is eating the world.” As a tech and startup junkie, I used to agree with Marc but I realized that business is still about people.

Think of a few key parts of your business:

Hiring: Software doesn’t hire. People do.

Employees: Business is all about the team. Sure software will help you make your business processes efficient but you will still need human beings to think of ideas and execute. You will need a human being to think of code to create software.

Marketing: While saas companies might not always need a sales team, marketing is what will get the customer to click. Today’s marketing involves channels such as content, social media, etc. On the other end of a twitter handle is a human being, making your brand feel human. Blog posts are not written by software, they are written by marketers. Their words and personality get your customer to fill out a form or buy your product.

Customers: In the new age of Inbound Marketing (which I really believe in), you generate leads online. But who are the leads? They are people! To actually make the sale, you still need a person to call the lead who is human as well. Sometimes a saas company might not need to call them but the person clicking “buy” is human not a computer.

So why am I going ra-ra about this? As someone who’s passionate about business and marketing, I see the world becoming more software and data driven. While that’s great, I’m afraid that a lot of people are running after vanity metrics and not realizing that the end user is still a human being.

What software has done is acted as a middleman that makes life easier. It has helped automate tasks and be more efficient. But at the end of the day, your end users are people, not software or computers.