“Salesforce has always been an applications company first,” Menninger says. “They have introduced or acquired technologies such as MuleSoft, Slack, and Data Cloud, which could help them become more of a platform play, but it’s a long road. Einstein 1 Studio could help further their attempts to become a platform, but it is still initially targeted at Salesforce applications.”
Like Salesforce, other large software vendors such as SAP and ServiceNow are pushing their own gen AI copilots for business (Joule and Now Assist, respectively). All three face similar challenges when it comes to handling data that is external to their applications, Menninger says.
“Enterprises that are committed to one of these platforms would consider bringing in outside data, but organizations that are committed to multiple application vendors are less likely to do so,” he says. “Nonetheless, it is important for these vendors to be able to incorporate these other data sources; otherwise, their value becomes diminished since so many analyses and operations require data from across the enterprise.”
To that end, SAP yesterday announced enhancements to its Datasphere “business data fabric” to facilitate governance for non-SAP data assets within customers’ environments.
End game
In the end, there may not be one single winner in the race to become the copilot building platform of choice. Instead IDC’s Parker sees three enterprise strategies emerging in the business copilot platform space.
The first would involve siloed development, in which each business function uses a combination of models and tools to create its own portfolio of copilots. The second would be to align each business function’s copilot strategy around “a set of ‘super platforms,’ like Adobe for marketing, Salesforce Data Cloud for sales, SAP for finance, etc.,” he says.
The third strategy would be to adopt a single strategic partner (or a minimal number of partners), through which all copilot projects would be conducted.
“This takes longer, but allows you to assert more control,” he says, noting that IBM, AWS, Google, and Microsoft are the most likely partners for this approach.
Whatever the outcome, IT leaders no doubt have a lot vested in keeping a close eye on how this race plays out.
