Anti-Platform: The Software Industrial Complex Is Over

TL;DR

Complexity was the business model. The software industry built a multi-trillion dollar machine by selling point solutions, each covering a sliver of a workflow, each demanding its own licences, integrations and consultants. And a lot of custom implementation on top to feed the SIs and Consulting firms.

Digital knowledge workers collapse the stack. Agentic systems do the work natively across your systems of record. Once you have a database and a workflow, you are good to go. No point solutions required.

The hard part moves under the hood. Making agentic systems reliable, production-grade and deeply integrated is genuinely difficult. That is where the engineering belongs, not in your procurement cycle.

Software gets faster, cheaper and personalised. That is the fundamental direction of the market, and it breaks the economics the industry was built on.

Our Argument:

Look at any enterprise software estate and you will find the same picture: hundreds of applications, each solving a fragment of a process, stitched together with integrations, middleware and armies of consultants. This was not an accident. It was the business model. Every gap between two point solutions was a sales opportunity. Every integration was a services engagement. Complexity was not a bug of the software industrial complex; it was the revenue engine.

The numbers tell the story. Gartner puts worldwide software spending at roughly $1.4 trillion in 2026, inside a total IT spend of over $6 trillion. For every dollar of licences, enterprises pour several more into implementation, integration, services and the infrastructure to keep it all running. Buying the software is the cheap part. Making it work is the multi-trillion dollar tax.

Digital knowledge workers end this. Agentic systems do the work the way your people do: natively, across your existing systems of record. They read from your CRM, write to your ERP, reconcile your spreadsheets and act in your email. They do not need a new platform between them and the work. They do not need a point solution for each 10% of the workflow. Once you have a database and a workflow, you are good to go.

To be clear, none of this is trivial under the hood. Making agentic systems reliable, keeping them in production, integrating them deeply and governing them properly is very hard engineering. But that complexity belongs to the builder of the digital worker, not to the buyer. You should never again need to license, implement and maintain a dozen narrow tools to complete one end-to-end process.

The consequence is that software becomes cheaper and faster to create. When an agentic system can be stood up on your existing data and shaped to your exact workflow, the marginal cost of "new software" collapses. You stop bending your business to fit a vendor's product and start getting software that fits you.

That is where the market is fundamentally moving: faster, cheaper, personalised software. The point solution era paid for a lot of nice offices. It will not pay for the next decade.