The world of enterprise tech is built on sturdy foundations. For decades, systems of record -- the databases, customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms we're all intimately familiar with -- have served as reliable pillars underpinning every major business. Vendors selling them have become household names and the technology is a core component of how enterprises operate, scale, and report. They've embedded themselves, seemingly immovably, into how the world does business. But here's the thing about immovable objects: Sometimes they meet unstoppable forces.
Today, the unstoppable forces of AI and automation are shaking the foundations of tech stacks built around systems of record. Yes, these systems can capture every transaction, record every interaction, and keep your enterprise humming along -- but at their core, they're passive. They exist to document what's already happened. If a business focuses too heavily on them, it becomes passive as well, bound to tools that deliver what they've always delivered.
For many business leaders, this kind of inertia is reliable, comforting, and easy. It's good enough to make it to the next quarter, good enough to offer customers the same thing they've always offered, good enough to rely on what's worked in the past. But in the age of AI and automation, good enough doesn't cut it anymore. In fact, this mentality not only leaves you vulnerable to disruption, it also means you'll quickly be eclipsed by businesses that understand it's time to pivot from building around systems of record to building around a new paradigm: systems of action.
Systems of action are set to supplant systems of record because they aren't just about storing or communicating data -- they're about taking action on that data. They're powered by AI agents that act autonomously to retrieve data from multiple sources, process information, and even make decisions. Put another way, these AI agents offer us a new foundation on which to build the enterprise, one where a bias for action is embedded into everything we do.