What Google Cloud Next 2026 actually told us about the titan pecking order

Google Cloud Next 2026 wrapped last week. The official version of the story is the one Google wanted you to read: 260 announcements, 1,302 customer use cases, the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, eighth-generation TPUs, a $750 million partner fund, an $240 billion Marketplace backlog. Big numbers. On-message keynote. Tidy "agentic era" framing.

The more interesting story is who showed up to validate it, and what Google actually built underneath.

Five of the seven enterprise titans I track walked into Las Vegas and announced expanded partnerships that all rest on the same architecture: Gemini Enterprise as the agent control plane, with the titan's product playing the role of premium ingredient. Salesforce. SAP. ServiceNow. Oracle. Adobe. Add Workday and Palantir Technologies to the picture, both adjacent to my titan list but visibly aligned in the same direction.

Two titans were not in the picture. Microsoft, because Copilot is the direct counter-position and Cloud Next is not Microsoft's stage. Zoho, because Zoho's stack does not need a Google motion and Zoho's buyer is not the same buyer.

Both absences matter. More about them a little later.

What Google actually built

Let’s start with the framing. Google did not just ship a model platform with new features. It repositioned Google Cloud from "AI development environment" to enterprise agent control plane. Vertex AI services and roadmap evolutions are now delivered through the new Agent Platform rather than as a standalone product. That is not a naming change, it's an entirely different playground.

The Agent Platform stack now visibly includes:

• Agent Identity for cryptographically secure agent authentication
• Agent Registry as the catalog of every agent and MCP server in scope
• Agent Gateway for traffic control and screening
• Agent Observability for production monitoring
• Agent Simulation for pre-deployment testing
• Agent Evaluation for measurable performance against benchmarks
• Agent Runtime with sub-second cold start
• Agent Inbox for human oversight of long-running agents
• Agent Studio as the low-code builder
• Agent Development Kit (ADK) across Python, Go, Java, with TypeScript

Sitting alongside this is the new Knowledge Catalog, which aggregates native context from partner data platforms and applications including Salesforce Data360, SAP, ServiceNow, Workday, and Palantir into a single accessible layer for Gemini agents.

That layer matters. It is the third leg of the orchestration story alongside interface (Gemini Enterprise app, Slack, Workspace) and runtime (Agent Platform). And physics teaches us that a third leg creates stability.

The Agent Marketplace and Agent Gallery surface partner-built agents directly inside the Gemini Enterprise app, with an IT-driven request-and-approval governance model. Open protocols carry the connective tissue: A2A, A2UI, and MCP, all positioned as neutral interoperability standards rather than proprietary lock-in.

This is the playground Google built. It is not a naming change. It is Google trying to redraw the enterprise AI battlefield.

Not by owning the CRM.

Not by owning the ERP.

Not by owning ITSM, HCM, marketing automation, or the system of record.

But by embracing them all.

It is Google Cloud repositioning from “AI development platform” to enterprise agent control plane.

Now look at who joined this merry party.

The seven partnership announcements, decoded one by one.

Salesforce

Agentforce Sales is in open beta inside Gemini Enterprise. Slack hosts Gemini Enterprise as a private preview app. Agentforce gets native Gemini reasoning through Atlas Reasoning Engine, with multimodal support across text, image, and video. Zero-copy access to Google Lakehouse is on the late-2026 roadmap. New BigQuery connectors for Salesforce Informatica IDMC are available now. Pepkor reportedly consolidated 64 million customer profiles down to 24 million using Salesforce Data 360 plus BigQuery, a 25 percent personalization reach lift. The framing from Srini Tallapragada is "agentic interoperability".

The translation is simple: Salesforce is letting Google become a distribution and work-surface partner for Agentforce, while Salesforce keeps the customer-data gravity and Atlas Reasoning Engine. Slack is the part of the deal that helps Salesforce most. Google Workspace and Gemini Enterprise are too big to ignore. This move is consistent with the recently announced Headless 360.

The tension that nobody named on stage is nevertheless there. If a buyer ends up with Agentforce on one side and Gemini Enterprise on the other, who governs the agents, where do they run, and which vendor gets paid for the orchestration? That fight is coming. Get yourself some popcorn!

SAP

SAP's announcement was imo the most strategically interesting of the week, and worth having a deeper look.

SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) Connect for Google enables bidirectional zero-copy data sharing between SAP and BigQuery. Cortex Framework metadata in BigQuery grounds Gemini agents in SAP enterprise context. Joule Agents in SAP CX become deployable inside Gemini Enterprise. SAP Engagement Cloud picks up agentic capabilities for content development, marketing briefs, visual concepts, and collaborative multi-agent execution. Marketing is the first GA use case in H2 2026, with the model designed to extend across the SAP CX portfolio over time.

The headline from SAP itself describes Gemini Enterprise as "central hub for data integrations and multi-agent coordination”. On the surface, that is a vendor conceding the orchestration layer.

It is not. Read it again.

SAP is not handing over the operational core. SAP is making sure the Gemini agents that buyers run cannot meaningfully execute against enterprise data without going through SAP's very own grounding layer. Cortex Framework metadata in BigQuery is the move that matters. It means the semantic context for "what a customer record actually means in this enterprise" runs on SAP's side. Google gets the AI execution layer. SAP gets to stay the meaning layer.

That is SAP looking stronger, not weaker. The friendly stage handshake is going to turn into a knife fight in the field about where business logic lives. SAP appears to have positioned itself well for that fight.

ServiceNow

ServiceNow AI Control Tower integrates with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform so that every agent and MCP server across both platforms appears in a single governed registry. Now Assist for IT Operations Management is available through Gemini Enterprise, focused on alert and incident management. Joint solutions ship in three industry domains: 5G autonomous network operations, retail predictive maintenance, and IT systems, all using ServiceNow agents and Gemini agents handing off through MCP and A2A. ServiceNow took home four 2026 Google Cloud Partner of the Year awards, including Agentic AI Innovation.

John Aisien positioned the agreement as "open, interoperable platforms, not walled gardens”. This framing is doing real work, and it is also strategically necessary. ServiceNow is the workflow titan most directly in Google's strategic crosshairs. Both companies want to be the orchestration layer above all systems. This partnership smooths the surface. Still, the strategic overlap is significant.

ServiceNow's strongest argument remains: "We already run the workflows, approvals, incidents, assets, service models, and operational context. Don't bolt orchestration on top. Run it where the work already lives". Google's counter is: "We can orchestrate across all of you, including ServiceNow". Both arguments are valid, and both are strong. Buyers will pick based on what they value more, neutrality across systems or depth inside the workflow platform that already governs work.

Partners today. Rival underneath. Both are true.

Oracle

Oracle's announcements were broader than the Database Agent that most coverage led with. The full set: Oracle AI Database Agent for Gemini Enterprise (currently in preview on Google Cloud Marketplace), a Managed MCP Server for Oracle workloads (also in preview), Database Center integration, Knowledge Catalog integration, GoldenGate integration, VPC Service Controls. Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud is now available across 15 regions with more to come.

Business users can query Oracle data in natural language without writing SQL. Identity propagates from Gemini Enterprise to the database via OAuth. Oracle's Deep Data Security enforces row- and column-level access at the database layer. Query processing stays inside the database, which Oracle frames as a security and latency benefit, and which has the side effect of keeping Oracle's data gravity intact.

Oracle is doing what Oracle has always done well. Make sure its database estate is unavoidable. Give Google enough access that the partnership is real. Do not pretend Oracle is going to own the AI front end. The Managed MCP Server, Knowledge Catalog hookup, Database Center, and GoldenGate pieces all point in the same direction: Oracle data stays central to AI execution regardless of where the agents are built; and the data stays in Oracle.

The database does not need applause. It needs to remain indispensable. Mission accomplished, I'd say.

Adobe

Adobe Marketing Agent for Gemini Enterprise lands in Google’s Agent Gallery. It connects natural language queries to Adobe's CX agentic capabilities, with insights on campaign performance, audiences, and journey monitoring, accessible from inside Gemini Enterprise. The integration is more lightweight than the others, which is consistent with Adobe's pattern.

Adobe benefits from showing up in the Gemini work surface, especially when marketing teams already live and breathe inside Workspace and Slack. But this is a distribution play, not a control-layer move on the level of SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, or ServiceNow. Adobe joins the gallery without conceding much architecturally and without claiming a piece of the orchestration plane. This is consistent with the Adobe Summit messaging.

Workday

Workday shows up through the Sana Self-Service Agent, which summarizes information from Workday and other sources and handles HR and finance tasks across hundreds of skills covering pay, time, and absence. Workday is also part of the Knowledge Catalog third-party context aggregation.

Workday is playing the employee-service and finance/HR productivity angle. It’s useful, sticky, high-volume in daily user activity. Compared with SAP and ServiceNow, it is narrower in operational control. Compared with Adobe, it is comparable in scope. Workday had a solid presence at this event, not a strategic re-positioning.

Palantir

Google says that Palantir is adding Gemini and BigQuery integrations for commercial customers, connecting models to critical AI workflows and operations. Palantir is also part of the Knowledge Catalog third-party context aggregation.

Palantir is the awkward guest at the titan table. It’s not a classic business application vendor but increasingly competing at the operational decision layer with Foundry and AIP. Google wants Palantir workloads close to BigQuery and Gemini. Palantir wants model optionality without losing AIP control. The integration is real and worth tracking precisely because Palantir does not usually settle for being an ingredient.

The pecking order this event produced

Most strategically advantaged: Google Cloud. It created the playground. The full agent control plane (Identity, Registry, Gateway, Observability, Simulation, Evaluation), the Knowledge Catalog, and the Marketplace make Google the layer everyone else runs on. Google’s risk is that it wants to be the enterprise control plane without owning the transactional cores that SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, ServiceNow, and Workday control. That requires relentless execution, not keynote poetry.

Most durable titan: SAP. SAP owns the operational core. The combination of BDC Connect and Cortex Framework gives SAP a stronger bridge into Google's AI without surrendering enterprise meaning. SAP's posture is "use Google's AI, but ground it in SAP business truth". That is the right defense and a subtle offense at the same time.

Most interesting tension: Salesforce. There's a great integration story today. The unresolved question is whether Agentforce and Gemini Enterprise will eventually compete for governance and orchestration once buyers are running both in production. And they will. Procurement will notice when both vendors invoice for the same workflow.

Most direct control-plane rival: ServiceNow. A visible partner. And an architectural competitor. The "open, interoperable" framing is correct in principle, and it is also the terminology a vendor uses when its core product overlaps strategically with the platform it just partnered with. The deciding factor for buyers is whether they want a neutral AI control plane above systems, or agentic execution inside the workflow platform that already governs work.

Most pragmatic: Oracle. No applause needed. The database stays indispensable. Managed MCP Server, GoldenGate, Knowledge Catalog hookup, VPC Service Controls all point in the right direction for Oracle. That’s pragmatic, and dangerous in the right way.

Useful but narrower: Adobe and Workday. Both gain Gemini Enterprise distribution reach. Neither announcement changes their strategic center of gravity. There is nothing earthshattering about them. They are domain wins, not control-plane bids.

Adjacent: Palantir. This is worth watching specifically because Palantir does not usually accept ingredient status.

The two missing names

Microsoft. Copilot exists exactly to defend the position Google is now contesting. Microsoft has spent two years building Copilot Studio, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Dynamics 365 agents, and an Azure-side AI tooling that competes head-on with what Google just announced. Microsoft was never going to show up at Cloud Next to validate Gemini Enterprise. Why would it?

The more interesting question is whether Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Oracle agents will sit as comfortably inside Copilot in twelve months as they now do inside Gemini Enterprise. Right now, the answer is no, and the gap appears to be widening. I expect Microsoft to respond at Build and Ignite. The main question then is whether the response will be "we have parity" or "we are bigger and we will route around you”.

Zoho works a different market segment. Zoho also builds its own AI stack. The company rarely participates in this kind of big vendor partnership theater. The absence is consistent and not so interesting when looked at in isolation. It becomes interesting, however, when paired with the observation that Zoho's mid-market and SMB-plus customers are largely outside the buying pattern Cloud Next 2026 is shaping. Two different conversations happening in two different rooms.

Open protocols, not walled gardens. Maybe.

I want to be careful about reading the "open, interoperable" framing.

A2A, A2UI, and MCP are all real, and they matter. ServiceNow's positioning is correct in principle. Salesforce kept Slack. Oracle kept the database. SAP kept Joule as the engagement layer in SAP applications. Adobe kept its CX stack untouched. Workday kept HR. Palantir kept AIP. None of these vendors handed over the asset they care most about.

But the registry is Google's. The gateway is Google's. The gallery, the runtime, the inbox, the identity model, the agent governance plane: all Google. Open protocols are not the same thing as a neutral platform. They are the price of admission to a platform that acts as a host.

The real question for the next twelve months is whether the protocols stay open enough that buyers can swap the host. If a customer can take A2A-compliant agents built around Gemini Enterprise and re-host them on Copilot Studio or AWS Bedrock AgentCore without rewriting most of the orchestration, the open framing holds. If swapping costs are high in practice, "open" is doing marketing work that the architecture does not back up.

I do not yet have any evidence either way. I expect to in the next two quarters with the first multi-vendor pilots moving into production.

What buyers should do this quarter

Force each titan to defend the front door. Salesforce will say Slack and Agentforce. SAP will say Engagement Cloud and Joule. ServiceNow will say ServiceNow. Microsoft will say Copilot. Google will say Gemini Enterprise. Make them defend the answer with specific cross-system workflows for agentic work. Note which vendor accepts being an ingredient in someone else's interface and which one fights for the seat.

Pin down the dates on zero-copy commitments. The Salesforce zero-copy with Google Lakehouse is late 2026. SAP BDC Connect is rolling out across 2026. Oracle's Managed MCP Server is in preview. Most of the headline-friendly capabilities are not in your tenant today. Build your 2026 plan around what you can run by Q3, not what is on a slide.

If you are a Microsoft shop, run a parallel evaluation. Bring in Copilot Studio. Ask whether Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow agents are first-class citizens inside it at the depth that Cloud Next demonstrated for Gemini Enterprise. Force Microsoft to demonstrate parity, not promises.

Treat the Agent Marketplace and Agent Gallery as procurement infrastructure. If your IT team adopts Gemini Enterprise as the agent procurement layer, that decision shapes which titans show up first in your future RFPs. Make this choice deliberately.

Test the governance question before you buy. If you end up with Agentforce, Joule, Now Assist, and a Gemini-Enterprise-built custom agent all running for the same business process, who governs them? Procurement will notice when you are paying twice for orchestration. Make a vendor own the answer in writing, and see to it that the SKUs do not overlap too much.

The unspoken partnership

The most interesting partnership at Next 2026 was the one nobody put in a press release. Five of seven titans, plus Workday and Palantir, plus a long list of consulting firms and ISVs, are all visibly aligning to ensure that Microsoft Copilot is not the only place enterprise AI gets done. None of them said that. All of their actions imply it.

That is the alliance worth watching.

I am still skeptical about how durable this alignment is once Microsoft responds, and buyer realities surface in the second half of 2026, and once we see what "open protocol" really means in production. All vendors will optimize for their own positions. They always do, and they need to. The orchestration question may stay answered for a year, or it may reopen the moment someone like Microsoft offers a credible alternative.

For now, Gemini Enterprise has the momentum. The titans showed up. The protocols are public. The Marketplace is live. The control-plane components are named. Google moved from "another model vendor" to "the agentic substrate the application titans run inside of”.

This is a very different conversation than the one we were having last year. It’s worth paying close attention to how it evolves and whether it is the right one.

Three titan announcements in two weeks reveal what enterprise software vendors are actually fighting over in 2026, and it is not agents.

If you have been tracking enterprise AI announcements through 2025, you have been watching a race about agent counts. How many prebuilt agents. How many industry-specific use cases. How many customer stories. Agents were the marketing, the demo, the SKU. A year of the same playbook.

Something shifted in April 2026.

Inside a two-week window, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow each published an announcement that, at first glance, looks like more of the same agent theater. Salesforce launched Headless 360 at TDX 2026 and the Agentforce Experience Layer. SAP pushed a simplified-architecture argument alongside a persistent agent memory layer on BTP. ServiceNow rolled out Context Engine and, on its SPM community blog, Fred Champlain published an essay reframing governance itself as "strategic decision debt”.

Different products. Different audiences. The same structural move.

All three titans just walked one layer down the stack.

Read individually, each announcement is a product release. Read together, they are a category shift. The competition is no longer about who has the best agent. It is about who owns the substrate those agents operate on. And each titan is staking a different piece of it.

The Pattern Nobody Is Naming

Strip the vendor branding from all three sets of material and the structural claim is identical:

“Your agents are only as good as the layer underneath them. The data they ground on, the logic they inherit, the memory they carry, the permissions they respect, and the decisions they represent. That layer is what we sell.”

These three vendors are by no means the only ones making this shift. They just did it in a remarkably short period, and on stages loud enough to frame the category.

The pitch is more sophisticated than the 2025 version. Agent count was a volume game, easy to parody and easy to commoditize once every vendor had a hundred prebuilt agents. Substrate is harder to commoditize, harder to rip out, and (not surprisingly) easier to price at a premium once customers have built architectural dependencies on it.

Each titan is claiming a different piece of the substrate. None of the claims overlap cleanly. All of them expand the vendor's footprint.

Salesforce: The Interface and Intent Layer

Salesforce made the boldest move. Headless 360 exposes every platform capability as API, MCP tool, or CLI command, which means external coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf) get live access to an org's data, workflows, and business logic. Agentforce Vibes 2.0 ships with open agent harnesses supporting both Anthropic and OpenAI SDKs. Developers no longer need to work inside Salesforce's own IDE.

Is the new? Not quite; API-first architectures exist for quite some time. And they are a best practice.

However!

The accompanying Agentforce Experience Layer (AXL) is the delivery side. Build logic once in Salesforce. Deliver the same agent response into Slack, Teams, mobile, ChatGPT, WhatsApp, a customer portal, or any third-party surface, with the UI rendering automatically adapted to each channel. Permissions inherit from the Salesforce platform.

This part is new.

The subtext is the real story. For twenty-seven years, Salesforce's primary interface was the browser. Headless 360 is an explicit statement that the browser has become optional. VentureBeat's framing of the Salesforce answer to "does a company still need a CRM with a graphical interface?" was a blunt no, and that is exactly the point. Joe Inzerillo, Salesforce's president of enterprise and AI technology, said Headless 360 lets agents operate directly on the platform's business logic and datasets "rather than relying on separate integrations or user interfaces”. Read together, Salesforce is telling buyers it wants to remain the system underneath, even when the user never opens a Salesforce tab.

Not everyone loves it. The "Context, Work, Agency, Engagement" framing can create the ultimate vendor lock-in architecture, and the pricing is conspicuously silent. Headless 360 is included in platform licenses today. That is a statement about today. Salesforce's historical pattern is to introduce capability in the base tier and later wrap premium SKUs around it. CIOs should be asking the pricing question before making the architectural commitment.

SAP: The Data and Process-of-Record Layer

SAP is running a different play. It is not trying to be the interface layer. It is trying to be the gravity well.

The simplified-architecture argument is a rejection of the 2024 playbook, which basically said: sprinkle Joule on top of S/4 and be AI-ready. The current SAP pitch, across the Clean Core guidance, the Reltio acquisition, the Business Data Cloud strategy, the SAP-RPT-1 foundation model for structured data, and the new agent memory layer on BTP, is a single argument: your AI is only as trustworthy as the ERP data underneath it, and most of the world's transactional data lives in SAP.

The agent memory layer deserves a deeper look. Persistent memory is where consumer AI assistants finally became useful. ChatGPT remembering preferences, Claude carrying project context across sessions. Enterprise agents have historically been stateless, forcing users to re-prime the same context on every session. SAP's answer to this problem is to build memory as a BTP service, grounded in HANA Cloud Vector, with short-term, long-term, and reflective memory tiers governed by enterprise policies (retention, right-to-be-forgotten, audit trail).

Not a plug-in. A layer.

The SAP story has one recurring weakness, though: pace. DSAG's Technology Days 2026 in Hamburg, which drew more than 3,000 participants, delivered a consistent message from users. More clarity. Less architectural theater. Customers want SAP to ship faster and integrate more smoothly, not add more conceptual layers. The "simplified architecture" framing is partly defensive. It is a tacit acknowledgment that the SAP AI stack has become overwhelming to prospective buyers and to existing customers trying to execute.

ServiceNow: The Governance and Decision Layer

ServiceNow made the most conceptually ambitious move of the three. And it did so without a single major product announcement on the day.

Fred Champlain's piece on the SPM community blog introduces "strategic decision debt" as a category. The argument: the accumulated weight of unmade, unclear, or inconsistent portfolio-level decisions is what actually prevents enterprises from turning AI capability into AI outcomes. It is not a technology problem. It is a governance problem. And, Champlain argues, the governance layer is what ServiceNow sells.

The product scaffolding around the argument is substantial. Strategic Portfolio Management. Enterprise Architecture. The newly announced Context Engine, built on ServiceNow's Service Graph and Knowledge Graph, which captures the "why" behind decisions alongside the "what." AI Control Tower for governing agent behavior. TrustCloud and ComplianceCow, both of which received ServiceNow investment, shipped AI-native risk and compliance apps directly on the platform earlier in the week, reinforcing the partner-network moat.

The piece that matters most is the language. If "strategic decision debt" becomes a term CIOs use in quarterly reviews, ServiceNow owns the vocabulary, which means it owns the sales motion. No other titan has been publishing framework-level essays this quarter. Salesforce is publishing product pages. SAP is publishing architecture diagrams. ServiceNow is publishing a hypothesis about why enterprises are stuck and is offering its product portfolio as the answer. That is analyst-grade positioning, and it is rare from a vendor.

The Two Battlegrounds

I look at all these titan moves through two lenses.

• Interface control: who owns how users and agents access business applications.
• Orchestration: who owns the layer that coordinates work across systems.

This set of announcements maps cleanly on either lens.

Salesforce is the aggressive play on interface control. Own the access, and you own the orchestration that follows. AXL is the clearest multi-surface interface-layer bet any titan has made so far. SAP's interface-control play is softer, still routing interactions through Joule and its own surfaces. ServiceNow, interestingly, is not fighting for the interface at all. It is interested in being the backbone under whatever interface the user happens to be using.

On orchestration, the roles invert. Salesforce orchestrates experiences across channels, and, excluding what MuleSoft does, is quieter on orchestrating workflows across non-Salesforce systems. SAP orchestrates processes across SAP and non-SAP via BTP, Integration Suite, Advanced Event Mesh, and now master data via Reltio. ServiceNow makes the most conceptually interesting move by extending orchestration into the decision flow itself. Context Engine plus Service Graph plus Knowledge Graph is orchestration applied to how decisions get made, not just how tasks get executed.

Three titans. Three different pieces of the substrate. No direct overlap. Significant expansion of footprint for each.

The Titans Who Skipped This Quarter

Reading these three announcements in sequence raises an interesting question. Where are Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, and Zoho?

Microsoft in particular is the puzzle. Copilot, Fabric, Dataverse, Foundry, Power Platform. Every component needed to tell the same substrate story is already on the Microsoft roadmap or already shipped. The gap is the narrative. Microsoft has the pieces, but Satya Nadella's team has not bundled them into a coherent layer-down argument the way Salesforce and ServiceNow have. If Build 2026 does not fix that, Microsoft cedes the architectural high ground on substrate for yet another quarter, while three of its main competitors keep compounding.

Oracle's AI Data Platform push is similar to SAP's BDC play but has not surfaced an equivalent integrated narrative. Adobe remains anchored to content and CX. Zoho continues its integrated-suite, lower-price playbook with less architectural theater, which is arguably the right move for Zoho's segment and consistent with its philosophy. It keeps the company out of this conversation, though, and that is a choice with consequences.

What Buyers Should Actually Do

The three recommendations from my LinkedIn post on this hold, and they deserve elaboration.

Stop evaluating AI features in isolation

A feature list is a snapshot. The substrate is what survives the next 18 months. Ask every vendor you are evaluating which layer of the substrate they claim to own, analyze whether the claim is architecturally coherent or three product pages stapled together, and what happens to your architecture if the vendor executes on that claim versus if they don't. Features come and go. Architecture commitments do not.

Ask the pricing question now, not later

Headless 360 is included in Agentforce 360 platform licenses today. SAP's agent memory layer is part of BTP today. ServiceNow's Context Engine sits inside existing product lines today. None of these vendors has announced whether they will keep the substrate capabilities in the base tier indefinitely. The historical pattern says no. Build your architectural dependencies with pricing clarity, not without it. And build the architecture in a way that those dependencies do not become impossible to unwind later. After all, today’s pricing clarity might be tomorrow’s pipe dream.

Treat "memory," "context engine," and "experience layer" as three costumes for the same problem

All three titans are building a substrate for agents to reason over. The vocabulary differs. The underlying capabilities: persistent cross-session state, grounded enterprise context, consistent multi-surface delivery are the same, just with different strengths and weaknesses in each implementation. Write down the capabilities your agents need. Map each vendor's product to these capabilities.

Do not let vendors map you to their product pages.

Three Things to Watch

Whether Microsoft responds at Build 2026 with a bundled substrate narrative, or lets Copilot keep carrying the whole story alone.

Whether SAP's Reltio integration actually ships as the promised trusted-data spine for Joule Agents or becomes another BTP component that customers must stitch together themselves.

Whether Salesforce's "Trust Moat" language around AXL holds up in enterprise deployments, where the every agent needs consistent permissions across Slack, Teams, ChatGPT, a customer portal, and more. If it does, lock-in critique loses force. If it does not, the critique becomes the dominant analyst read.

The Question That Matters

All three titans have moved one layer down, coming from different angles. The logic is sound. The architectural ambitions are serious. The open question is whether three companies each trying to own a different piece of the substrate produces three coherent platforms, or three partial platforms that leave buyers integrating the substrate themselves.

Twelve months from now, we will know whether April 2026 was the moment the agent conversation matured, or the moment it splintered.

I am curious whether CIOs are reading these three announcements as compatible stories, or as three competing bids for the same piece of architectural real estate.

These days every significant software vendor and some others, too, is positioning itself as a CX- and/or a platform player.

By now, it is well known, what it means to be a platform player, and this is also not the main topic of this post. Just as much: In order to be a significant CX player, one quite simply needs to be a platform player. 

Also, regardless of whether one has a platform or not, if everyone is a CX and a platform player, then obviously this is nothing that differentiates one vendor from the other anymore. Customers meanwhile nearly expect a set of solutions by one vendor being built upon one platform – or at least to appear like they are built on one platform. This basically means that “platform” as a thing to emphasize on has reached its zenith.

And then, there is an additional problem associated with the platform game.

A platform market is a kind of a winner takes it all market. Following the analysis and argumentation of Ray Wang in his new book Everybody Wants to Rule the World, in a platform market there will be only two major players. All other players are becoming insignificant or will vanish. While this sounds somewhat dystopian the point that I want to make is that there will not be a great many successful and strong players in a platform market. To use a metaphor, at one point in time a few vendors will have created enough gravity to become the entity that customers are attracted to.

It is also visible that the first vendors have understood this and are acting strongly to create this required gravity.

Salesforce seems to be one of the first ones. Regardless of whether one calls Salesforce a platform company by design, it is doing everything to grow. Analysing the company’s last quarterly figures, one can come to the conclusion that it continues to buy growth at the expense of profitability. It essentially copies and transfers Amazon’s successful model to the (wider) CRM market. 

SAP is working from its strong ERP and supply chain footprint in a bid to get more ‘share of wallet’ of the enterprise applications, both in the direction of the supply chain as well as into the direction of customer facing applications. SAP practically ‘owns’ business transactions with around 80 percent of all business transactions crossing SAP systems.

Oracle uses its strong technology stack, coming from the home base of the most powerful database, augmented by an integrated hard- and software stack. 

Microsoft, finally, comes from a strong productivity, gaming and operating system footing, combined with a wealth of data.

And these are the Titans of the CX applications world, commanding a market share of something between 35 and 45 percent of this market. These four, plus Adobe, already had a market share of more than 36 percent in H2, 2019 according to the IDC worldwide semiannual software tracker of April 2020. The rest of the market is quite fragmented. 

Even though this number is quite old, we see that the marketplace is slowly moving towards the consolidation direction that Ray also sees.

All these players also have their share of buzz and their marketing messages.

All of them have a strong ecosystem that surrounds them.

Which makes it difficult for other companies who are in the market, too, and want to differentiate themselves from the others. Of course, they have everything that is needed for a successful ecosystem play, too. Including the very important ecosystem. There are only so many levers that are left to them:

• Connecting one’s brand to strong principles and ethics that are well beyond what the marketplace usually offers.
• Tying one’s brand to strong positive emotions
• Focus on the PaaS parts of the stack supporting easy extensibility and automation
• Providing deep industry experience in a number of relevant industries to become the de facto standard
• A price point that is lower than the competition’s, while still offering attractive functionality

There may be more, but let’s concentrate on these.

These levers are used by the many players, including the tier one vendors. For example, all tier one vendors offer industry solutions. They are also more or less successfully connecting themselves to principles like sustainability or giving back. Often, this runs under the flag of ‘purpose’, one of the industry’s most misused terms.

On the other hand, Zoho does credibly showcase an ethics story, with its strong focus on privacy, rural enablement, humbleness, and employees. It is not a marketing-story, but one that is lived in the company (e.g., check cookies). This story extends into something that is very tangible for customers: Pricing. Zoho showcases that it is possible to benefit from pursuing principles; this strategy reduces Zoho’s own cost, which makes it possible to offer solutions at a low price point while staying profitable. One could call this ‘social capitalism’. It is a very good message that appeals to empathy and rational thinking at the same time – and because it is credible because the company itself also lives it.

Freshworks ties positive emotions to its brand, starting from the company’s name. Fresh is not boring. The recent customer and analyst event took up the name and was called Refresh. The message that was sent out loud and clear during this event was “delight made easy”. This story was also how the event, with all the challenges that a hybrid event has to offer, was run. The website expresses the same. So do most people I had the pleasure to interact with.

This is a strong message, because this is reflecting on something that the whole CRM/CX industry suffers from since its inception: No fun, no ease, no help is offered by the software. And it ties into strong positive emotions. The challenge is to keep up with this message over time because it raises expectations and missed expectations are a great distractor.

SugarCRM is going the route of automation and ease, with the slogan “let the platform do the work”. In contrast to Freshworks, SugarCRM is focusing more on the so-called left brained people and the rational side, talking in outcomes rather than emotions. The outcomes are more accuracy, less effort and faster time to use. These are again arguments that appeal to the ratio, not to emotion – even though the slogan is quite catchy and certainly hits a nerve. It is also a statement that raises expectations that need to be met.

Similar, ServiceNow. ServiceNow focuses on workflow, automation and offers some industry solutions. The company says “Let the work flow from anywhere”, which is closer to an outcome. The most interesting part is that ServiceNow also positions itself as the platform of platforms, i.e., a meta platform. This is a step up in the game. It recognizes that it is probably unlikely to succeed in a head-on clash with the titans but better to focus on connecting different infrastructures, i.e., different platforms. This is a smart move, also considering that many companies do not have a single platform strategy in place often run best-of-breed strategies.

What does this mean?

As said above, with every vendor emphasizing on “platform” and “CX” it is obvious that these terms have reached their zenith. While CX is an outcome – an end customer (or a user if we include employee experience) creates experiences as part of engagements – a platform is more about technology than outcomes. Furthermore, a platform is a means to an end and not an end in itself. This is very similar to “artificial intelligence” or “machine learning”. This means that it is more urgent to think about the term “platform”.

In the short term, for a company it is important to position one’s platform with a suitable story to be visible, recognized and sufficiently differentiated as a player. 

Still, while important, some of these ways to differentiate oneself might not lead to a lasting differentiation.

Having said that, tying one’s brand to high ethics and strong positive emotions is a very good thing, given that the company lives up to the promise. The positive emotions might even work better than the high ethical standards. This is because ethics appeal more to the rational being while emotions run deeper. We can see this all the time in (b2b) sales processes. 

If you have it, maintain it and tie it strongly to benefits of applications and solutions, to outcomes. If you don’t have it: Build it, but credibly.

On the longer run, there needs to be more. 

More focus on outcomes and users.

For users, outcomes revolve around three levers:

• Solutions are available wherever they are, physically and digitally
• Solutions show them what is important, and give them good advice
• Solutions work the way they do. This includes the user interface that needs to cater for text and voice

That way, the platform, that is more interesting for the IT department than the users, gets more into the background in favor of outcomes.