Who pays for agentic AI? The enterprise budget problem no vendor will address

Filip Misovski, CEO of Semos Cloud, posed this question on LinkedIn this week, and it got me thinking about the reality of enterprise AI for CIOs. You hear this a lot in enterprise tech circles. Some argue for - and seem excited about the prospect - of CRM systems getting unbundled through systems of big data (Snowflake, Databricks), systems of flexibility (agentic workflows and orchestration), and systems of intelligence (knowledge graphs and intelligent apps). They posit that this will mean sales people, for example, will work through a "library" of AI agents rather than logging into Salesforce.

My colleague Jon Reed wasn't buying it. He responded:

Analytics players have been taking money from transactional systems for years, and that won't change. If you are a sales rep you are not going to want to rely on the accuracy and veracity of everything you query an agent about for CRM. You ...