Agentic AI is likely to have an unwelcome side effect: Data wars and lawsuits between platforms.
Process mining company Celonis filed a US antitrust complaint against SAP in the US District Court of California, San Francisco Division. The complaint alleges that SAP is restricting Celonis' access to data on its ERP platform in favor of SAP-owned rival Signavio.
Celonis and SAP have had a long relationship and the former was in the SAP Startup Focus program in 2012. Celonis alleged in its complaint that "SAP is leveraging its control over its ERP ecosystem and the impending forced migration of customers to SAP's S/4HANA cloud-based ERP solution to prevent SAP customers from sharing their own data with third-party providers, including Celonis, without paying prohibitively expensive fees.
The complaint further argues that SAP is bundling Signavio and preventing competitors like Celonis from extracting data from a customer's ERP system. Celonis alleges that SAP is making it impossible to use non-SAP process mining. SAP hasn’t responded to the lawsuit yet.
While Celonis is connecting to SAP for process intelligence, you can easily imagine that these data access skirmishes will proliferate as millions of AI agents start trying to complete tasks autonomously. Data ecosystems work--until they don't. Is orchestrating processes as an independent third party really that different from the emerging AI agent orchestration platforms?
There will be no shortage of neutral-ish agentic AI platforms. ServiceNow's latest release of its Now Platform has a bevy of tools to connect agents and orchestrate them. Boomi launched AI Studio. Kore.ai launched its AI agent platform, and eyes orchestration. Zoom evolved AI Companion with agentic AI features and plans to connect to other agents. Without data connections there won’t be cross platform orchestration.
Meanwhile, enterprise technology giants are all playing the platform game. When your data is on a platform you're locked in to some degree. For agentic AI to meet its promise, enterprises will need to connect agents on multiple platforms. It's not difficult to envision a world where SAP agents connect with Salesforce Agentforce and perhaps, ServiceNow, AWS and Google Cloud to autonomously execute a task.
Beyond the standards of AI agent communications there will be data handoffs. Some platforms, say Salesforce and Google Cloud or Databricks and SAP, will have zero copy data sharing arrangements. Other vendors may collect tolls from potential rivals not in an alliance. These tolls are going to the basis of future data wars.
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None of these data skirmishes are surprising. Enterprise vendors have typically tried to keep your data and prevent rivals from benefiting. CIOs will tell you tales about full use vs. restricted use when it comes to extracting data from one platform and sharing it with third party applications. Procurement departments can rant about expensive API usage fees and rate limits. Tight integration is also designed to keep you on one platform and make it difficult to connect third party vendors. Hyperscale cloud vendors have played the data egress fee game.
Sure, you can connect your data to third parties and even transfer data to new platforms. Just expect some technical and financial pain.
Where the enterprise technology data playbook becomes worrisome is agentic AI. The customer should have control of the enterprise data. Enterprises should be able to connect platforms and their agents to complete processes and autonomously make decisions. Vendors today like to pretend that agentic AI will only happen on their platforms.
It's worth noting that agentic AI is going to tax transactional systems with API calls. There is SaaS scale in terms of API calls and then there's agentic AI calls, which will be a whole new ballgame. There may be a need for some pricing model to address the strain.
Either way, agentic AI is going to scale the business-as-usual data charges and the big platforms are naturally inclined to put up a few barriers to smaller vendors. Simply put, Celonis' lawsuit vs. SAP isn't likely to be a process mining one off. Agentic AI will require the same type of data access at scale. The data wars between vendors is just starting and customers are going to be caught in the middle. Just remember your data belongs to you and not your vendor.
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