Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: December 3, 2025
In 2025, the enterprise software market shifted decisively from AI hype to embedded, operational agentic AI, with major vendors integrating intelligence directly into workflows, data layers, and multi-agent orchestration frameworks. As deployments scaled, the conversation moved beyond capabilities to focus on value realization, governance, interoperability, and evolving AI pricing models. Looking ahead to 2026, buyers will prioritize measurable business outcomes, rewarding vendors that can demonstrate AI-driven revenue gains, cost reductions, and operational scale enabled by unified data foundations and well-governed multi-agent architectures.
What is Covered in this Article:
- A quarter-by-quarter review of major AI and agentic AI developments across leading enterprise software vendors in 2025, including platform launches, product expansions, restructuring efforts, and ecosystem moves from ServiceNow, Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe, and Workday.
- The evolution from AI hype to embedded, operational AI value, detailing how vendors shifted from add-on AI features to integrated multi-agent platforms embedded in core workflows, data layers, and subscription tiers.
- Market dynamics around deployment momentum, pricing models, and customer adoption, including embedded-AI economics, cross-platform interoperability, governance frameworks, and the growing importance of accelerators, services, and customer proof points.
- An analyst perspective on how the AI competitive landscape is converging, emphasizing the rise of agent platforms, the challenges of vendor claims wars, and the growing buyer emphasis on measurable business outcomes such as revenue impact and profitability.
The News: As the year 2025 draws to a close, it is clear that AI – and in particular, agentic AI – has taken center stage. It is virtually impossible to visit a vendor’s website, sit in a vendor briefing, or read an article about a vendor without seeing agentic AI being mentioned prominently, along with optimistic predictions on how agentic AI will improve productivity, efficiency, and overall effectiveness for both human workers and automated processes.
That said, the path from agentic hype to reality remains an ongoing journey, and it is often useful to examine the waypoints of progress when assessing a particular vendor’s approach and likelihood of delivering results. While previous progress isn’t always an indicator of future innovation velocity or success, it is still worth taking a look back at the announcements and achievements over the past year.
Q1 2025: AI Platforms Move from Add-On to Embedded Value
The first quarter of 2025 was a critical inflection point for enterprise AI strategy, as major software vendors accelerated the shift from standalone AI features to fully embedded, platform-level intelligence. Rather than treating generative and agentic AI as premium add-ons, vendors began bundling advanced capabilities into core subscriptions—reshaping competitive differentiation, pricing dynamics, and customer expectations.
ServiceNow launched AI Agent Orchestrator and AI Agent Studio on January 29, alongside thousands of pre-configured agents spanning IT, HR, customer service, and operational workflows. Notably, these AI Agents were included at no additional cost for Pro Plus and Enterprise Plus customers, which helped to position ServiceNow not just as an AI workflow provider, but as a platform embedding agentic automation as a default value driver—significantly raising the bar for competitors still monetizing AI à la carte.
Oracle also advanced its “AI included” messaging, expanding embedded intelligence within Fusion Cloud Sales. The latest enhancements automate record-keeping, email drafting, and insight delivery, reinforcing Oracle’s push to make AI pervasive across Fusion applications and reducing the need for customers to layer third-party AI tools on top.
Microsoft, meanwhile, focused on the commercial foundations required to support scalable AI monetization. Updates to its New Commerce Experience pricing telemetry signaled a move toward greater transparency and partner alignment.
Workday announced layoffs affecting roughly 1,750 employees (8.5% of its workforce) as part of a broader restructuring to reallocate spend toward AI and platform development. The move illustrated the significant resource shift required to compete in an AI-centric market and highlighted the short-term operational disruption vendors are willing to absorb to accelerate AI roadmaps.
Finally, Adobe used Adobe Summit 2025 to formalize its platform approach, unveiling the Adobe AI Platform and Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator, alongside new AI agents designed to drive campaign execution, personalization, and content workflows. The event showcased Adobe’s commitment to agentic AI across content supply chains—leveraging Firefly Services APIs for translation, reframing, and 3D content generation—to meet what Adobe described as increasing content and real-time customer experience demands.
Q2 2025 – From Hype Cycles to Deployment Momentum in Enterprise AI
While the early-year headlines belonged to major platform launches, the story that emerged in the spring revolved around how vendors operationalized agentic AI across workflows, and how customers and partners were beginning to put these capabilities to work.
ServiceNow’s January launch of AI Agents moved into broad availability, with customers getting hands-on access. This dynamic positioned ServiceNow as a catalyst for ecosystem-driven agent deployment, rather than simply a provider of standalone automation features.
Across Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, and others, April was marked by a steady cadence of general availability milestones and incremental improvements to Copilot, Joule, and other emerging agent frameworks. While less headline-grabbing than the earlier platform reveals, these updates were critical milestones in turning conceptual AI roadmaps into operational capabilities customers can deploy confidently.
Microsoft introduced multi-agent orchestration in Copilot Studio, enhanced governance controls, and reinforced Azure AI Foundry and Microsoft 365 Copilot as the foundational stack for building and operating enterprise agents. The emphasis on orchestration, control, and platform alignment reflects Microsoft’s intent to own the enterprise agent runtime layer.
SAP followed with its own push toward ubiquity, making Joule “omnipresent” across the SAP portfolio and expanding its enterprise AI agent library through Joule Studio. SAP also spotlighted ecosystem interoperability—particularly with Microsoft—signaling that cross-platform agent collaboration will likely become table stakes for vendors seeking to work with large enterprises that employ heterogeneous environments.
At ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2025, the company doubled down on its AI-native platform positioning, highlighting autonomous IT, expanded AI capabilities, and a growing enablement motion through ServiceNow University. The company’s “AI + Data + Workflows” messaging reinforces its strategy: embed intelligence deeply within operational processes rather than bolt it on.
Adobe, meanwhile, continued to extend its Summit themes with practical enterprise patterns focused on agentic content operations, real-time personalization, and AI-driven marketing workflows. The follow-on messaging was designed to help enterprises translate Adobe’s platform narrative into deployable use cases, particularly within content supply chains.
Notably, vendors across the spectrum leaned into adoption programs, including consulting services, accelerators, and reference architectures, which collectively aimed to transform early AI pilots into meaningful scale during 2025. This reflects a broader market recognition: the next competitive battleground is not merely AI capability, but successful customer deployment and measurable outcomes.
Q3 2025 – AI Pricing Models and Platform Marketing Take Center Stage
As enterprise AI moved deeper into mainstream deployment, the conversation began to shift from capability to economics, visibility, and control. Industry coverage increasingly highlighted how generative and agentic AI are becoming both revenue drivers and strategic lock-in mechanisms. The debate around per-user, consumption-based, and “AI included” pricing models intensified, with customers scrutinizing whether vendors are delivering measurable value or using AI to justify higher subscription tiers.
Oracle and SAP continued to hone their respective embedded-AI narratives, positioning intelligence as a core component of existing subscriptions rather than a premium add-on. Oracle’s messaging emphasized that AI is included across Fusion applications and database tiers, reinforcing its platform economics. SAP, meanwhile, focused on how Joule and its expanding agent portfolio were part of baseline subscription value, strengthening the case for SAP environments as AI-ready without incremental spend.
Adobe delivered strong enterprise adoption proof points in the market, reporting that 99% of the Fortune 100 have used AI capabilities within Adobe applications, and nearly 90% of its top 50 enterprise accounts have adopted AI-first offerings such as GenStudio, Firefly Services, and Acrobat AI Assistant. These figures highlight Adobe’s evolution from a creative tools provider to a foundational content infrastructure platform powered by AI.
Workday announced its Illuminate AI agents, including Case Agent for HR case management, Performance Review Agent, and Financial Close Agent. The company positioned AI as integral to daily HR and finance workflows and introduced its new Workday Data Cloud to support open, AI-ready data strategies.
Q4 2025 – Agent Platforms Become the New Enterprise Battleground
The fourth quarter of 2025 was marked by Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce event, which was highlighted by the company’s rebranding of its core platform and modules around Agentforce 360, powered by Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud), which it believes will be the engines driving its next phase of AI growth. Agentforce 360 is the new name of Salesforce’s global agent platform, while Data 360 is designed to provide a unified, structured, and unstructured data foundation required to fuel agentic automation at scale.
Slack also played a prominent role in that story around agents as a unifying tool for workers, with the debut of a rebuilt AI Slackbot, now positioned as a personalized work companion and an “agentic operating system” that integrates Salesforce applications, Tableau insights, and third-party tools. Slack’s evolution is designed to reinforce Salesforce’s goal of embedding agentic workflows directly into daily user interactions, rather than relegating AI capabilities to standalone interfaces.
Salesforce also used Dreamforce to highlight its broader AI investment thesis, pledging $15 billion in AI-linked funding in San Francisco and publicly targeting more than $60 billion in revenue by 2030—growth the company ties directly to AI platform adoption.
Meanwhile, Oracle’s AI World 2025 event advanced a unified AI strategy featuring a new “user AI” experience across its applications, deeper embedded and agentic capabilities in Fusion and industry solutions, and a broadened partner ecosystem spanning cloud, infrastructure, and vertical applications. Oracle’s emphasis on verticalized AI scenarios reflects increasing customer demand for domain-specific outcomes rather than generalized AI capabilities.
Adobe MAX 2025, the company’s annual event focused on creatives and creative workflows, continued Adobe’s transformation into an AI-driven creative infrastructure provider. The launch of Adobe AI Foundry—a managed service enabling enterprises to train brand-specific AI models across video, 3D, and text—strengthened Firefly’s position as the core creative engine. Adobe’s strategy signals a move beyond tools toward enterprise-grade creative model management.
Microsoft Ignite 2025 delivered one of the clearest articulations of an enterprise agent control layer with the introduction of Agent 365, designed to manage AI agents across the organization. Microsoft also unveiled new Microsoft 365 Copilot features and Work IQ, an intelligence layer that leverages work patterns, preferences, and organizational context to tailor agent behavior. The messaging was reinforced through the Book of News, which positioned Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio as the primary environment for building multi-agent systems with security and governance as core differentiators.
Was 2025 Really the Year of Agentic AI, or Just More Agentic Hype?
Analyst Take: As the year draws to a close, enterprise software vendors continue to converge on a common strategic theme: agent platforms, supported by unified data and governed deployment, will define competitive advantage across the near- and medium-term. The winners will be those that pair robust multi-agent architectures with clear economic models and demonstrable customer outcomes and bottom-line value. While there has been significant progress around agentic AI, vendors are still tasked with making the case in 2026 that the technology can deliver true business value.
While technology capability continues to improve at an astonishing rate, the biggest challenge for end-customers will be how to parse through the increasingly similar marketing and sales messaging coming from vendors. Terms and phrases such as “unique,” “the only vendor,” and other superlatives are thrown about constantly as though they will help drive buying decisions, though it could be argued that these claims wars do little to actually move the needle, in terms of driving buyer interest or actions (clients can see my Analyst Insight Report publishing in mid-December on the Futurum Intelligence Platform for a more in-depth look at these marketing and positioning issues).
In 2026, while we can expect to see these feature sets and capability claims wars continue, it is also likely that vendors will start to highlight customers who have achieved meaningful value from their AI investments, beyond simple task-based metrics. As CIOs and other buyer personas assess software purchasing, expect to see a focus on how AI and agentic AI actually translate into top-line revenue expansion or bottom-line profitability. These measures provide a more accurate way to quantify how well AI is actually delivering on vendors’ promises, as they capture the technology’s ability to deliver benefits at scale.
What to Watch:
- As more vendors shift from premium AI add-ons to “AI included” models, the market expectation for embedded intelligence is rising quickly. Vendors still monetizing on an a la carte basis risk losing differentiation and deal momentum unless they clearly tie premium AI tiers to measurable, enterprise-level outcomes.
- From Salesforce Agentforce 360 to Microsoft Agent 365, SAP Joule, ServiceNow AI Agents, and Adobe AI Foundry, buyers will increasingly evaluate vendors on multi-agent orchestration, governance, and data unification layers. Vendors must watch how fast peers mature their cross-platform agent ecosystems and control planes.
- Buyers are increasingly fatigued by “claims wars” and superlatives. In 2026, procurement teams will reward vendors that can demonstrate revenue expansion, margin improvement, or scaled productivity gains—not just task-level efficiency. Vendors should monitor competitors’ emerging customer case studies tied to business KPIs.
- Vendors must track how rivals package consumption pricing, embed data clouds, and invest in adoption programs—since ease of deployment and cost predictability will increasingly determine platform standardization.
Disclosure: Futurum is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum as a whole.
Other insights from Futurum:
Salesforce Launches Agentforce Commerce as AI Shopping Traffic Jumps 119%
Microsoft Ignite 2025: AI, Agent 365, Anthropic on Azure & Security Advances
Unlocking Enterprise Value: The Real-World Benefits and ROI of SAP’s Embedded Business AI
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
