For decades, enterprise operations have been organized around functions. Sales, finance, legal, procurement and operations each own a distinct part of the business, and enterprise software followed the same structure. CRM was built around sales, ERP around finance, and specialized applications around the teams they serve.
Information fragmented accordingly. Customer data lives in one system, financial information in another, contracts elsewhere. The business, however, does not operate in such clean divisions. A single customer request might depend on sales history, contractual obligations, current pricing, product usage and previous support issues.
Fragmented software has left people to bridge the gaps between systems. They determine what matters, coordinate with other teams and move the task forward.
AI changes this. An intelligent system can begin with an objective, determine what it needs to accomplish it and draw on the appropriate systems, rules and capabilities. In the case of the customer request, it can assemble the relevant history, check the governing contract, incorporate pricing and product information, and involve appropriate people when decisions need to be made.
Existing systems of record can remain in place. AI can draw across them without requiring the process to live inside any one of them.
The result is a larger unit of automation. Traditional enterprise software has largely automated individual activities and predefined processes. AI allows automation to extend beyond those activities and processes to the outcome they collectively produce.
This matters because improving individual parts of an operation does not necessarily improve the operation as a whole. An airline can improve aircraft utilization, crew scheduling and maintenance independently without improving the reliability of the flight schedule they support. The opportunity with AI is to manage these dependencies around a shared objective.
Traditional enterprise software organized information around functions. AI makes it possible to organize functions around information.