As AI fragments, enterprise control is the next battleground

"Over the coming year, enterprises will absorb a variety of these AI providers' technologies in earnest and at scale-department by department, role by role. Legal teams will standardize on tools like Harvey. Customer service teams will rely on Glean or purpose-built agents. Development teams may choose resources from Anthropic. Marketing, engineering, finance, and HR will similarly gravitate toward AI resources from Microsoft, xAI, or OpenAI, optimized for their specific needs."

"The same dynamic emerged with data platforms. Early efforts focused on centralized applications like data lakes, but as use cases multiplied, organizations often found that no single system served every real-world use case equally well. Most enterprises responded by adopting multiple tools around a shared data foundation. In both cases, organizations that had prepared themselves for flexibility were better positioned."

Different AI providers excel at distinct tasks, so enterprises will adopt specialized AI tools per department and role rather than relying on a single vendor. Legal, customer service, development, marketing, finance, HR, and other functions will select providers optimized for their needs. Many vendors are launching complementary products, including browsers, increasing complexity for enterprise leaders. Historical parallels with cloud and data platform adoption show that initial single-provider simplicity gives way to multi-vendor architectures as use cases multiply. Organizations that prepare for flexibility, governance, and integration will be better positioned to manage the accelerating, diversified AI landscape.

Read at Fast Company