Enterprise AI spending grew one tool at a time. A business unit licensed a copilot, IT stood up a pilot with a hyperscaler’s foundation model, and a data science team built something custom because off-the-shelf tools didn’t fit. Each decision made sense on its own. Three years later, those decisions have produced an estate, not a strategy: several model providers under contract, overlapping copilots doing the same job in different departments, and integration, governance, and vendor-management costs that never appeared on the original purchase order.
Enterprise buyers are answering with consolidation, not more tools, and per-seat pricing is breaking down at the same time. Futurum Research surveyed more than 800 software decision-makers and found that 87% now run most of their applications on a single comprehensive or all-in-one platform, leaving only 13% pursuing a best-of-breed approach. Agentic AI compounds the shift: an agent runs continuously, calls other systems on its own, and generates activity with no fixed relationship to headcount, so a license built around a human logging in no longer predicts what a workload will cost.
In our latest thought leadership brief, The Platform Payoff: How AI Makes the Case for a Unified Enterprise Stack, completed in partnership with Salesforce, Futurum Research examines why enterprise buyers are consolidating fragmented AI tools into unified platforms, and what that shift means for how software gets priced and bought.
In this report, you will learn:
- Why the per-seat pricing model that has worked for two decades breaks down under agentic AI workloads
- How more than 800 software decision-makers are consolidating vendors, and why a platform-centric approach is winning favor over best-of-breed buying
- What buyer data reveals about how enterprises value embedded AI versus stand-alone, metered pricing
- How Salesforce’s consolidated Core, Advanced, and Max editions and its Agentic Enterprise License Agreement address the pricing mismatch
- A working checklist for evaluating platform consolidation before the next negotiation or renewal
If you are interested in learning more, be sure to download your copy of The Platform Payoff: How AI Makes the Case for a Unified Enterprise Stack today.
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.
