The main conflict isn’t about the fastest model; it’s about control over your data and the cost involved.
Let’s take a look at the big trends, as seen in vendors’ announcements over the past year.
The Great Software ‘AI-tification’
The year kicked off with a clear message: You may not have wanted AI in your tools, but now it’s there, and you’re paying for it anyway.
- Forced Adoption: Vendors like Google and Microsoft started bundling core AI capabilities (like Gemini and Copilot) into their essential productivity suites, essentially making AI use a mandatory part of the subscription price. This has rebounded on Microsoft recently, with allegations of consumer rights breaches.
- The Rise of the Digital Servant: The industry settled on the Industrial AI Agent as the path to measurable value. These are specialised, autonomous digital assistants woven deep into business processes, moving AI from the experimental chat window to core operational workflows.
Standout: ‘VENDORiQ: Salesforce’s Embedded Industrial AI Agents – The Silent Revolution in Enterprise Workflow Automation’, IBRS, March 2025.
Hi, It’s Me… I’m the problem!
While it is tempting to blame AI hype on ‘vendor overreach’, it is really a symptom of our abdication of responsibility to do the fundamentals correctly: to look for a magic bullet for organisational improvements. Believing AI is the ultimate cure-all is as unrealistic as thinking a pill is easier than exercising or dieting. The problem isn’t the AI vendor’s ambition, but our lack of action and reluctance to adopt the change practices vital for successful digital transformation. We have let large AI companies take charge of creating value for us because we believed they would provide a technological solution that relieved us of the responsibility of defining value, managing our data, simplifying our processes and leading change.
Standout: ‘VENDORiQ: Google’s AI Hype Hides a Bigger Problem,’ IBRS 2025
The Unsexy, Essential Battles
The flashiest announcements rarely addressed the most critical enterprise problems: money, risk, and data integrity.
- The Bill is Due: After months of loss-leading, vendors had to get serious about monetising AI. Salesforce’s shift to the consumption-based flex credits model offered refreshing transparency, but carried a warning: expect AI costs to jump sharply as complex, multi-agent workflows gain traction.
- Context is King: The sheer unreliability of generative AI’s ‘reasoning’ put the spotlight on older technologies, confirming our belief that graph databases are the missing piece of the puzzle. Graph technology provides the rock-solid, accurate context that AI workflows need to be useful for business.
Standout: ‘VENDORiQ: Workday Agentic AI: Industrial AI Agents are Coming to Your Core Systems!’, IBRS, February 2025.
Special Mention: ‘VENDORiQ: Zoho Reveals the Shape of Things to Come with Agentic AI for Tier-Two ERP’, IBRS, February 2025.
Biff & Bash! Digital Battlefield Heats Up
Two major showdowns redefined market boundaries.
- Sovereign AI: Geopolitical instability meant IT leaders couldn’t shake the ‘America first’ feeling. This anxiety drove the imperative for sovereign AI, leading Google to rush to assure customers that AI processing for sensitive data can now stay completely onshore in Australia. The irony is that China’s relentless promotion of highly performant open source AI models may be an avenue for AI sovereignty. IBRS expects 2026 to be framed as a war between the US and China for AI dominance, with Australian organisations looking to remain neutral.
- The Creative Coup: The biggest market clash involved Adobe and Canva. While Adobe focused on high-end solutions (Firefly Foundry), Canva mounted a direct assault by making its professional-grade Affinity suite ‘free forever’, aiming to fundamentally undercut Adobe’s entire subscription model. However, the real battleground for both is their use of AI. Adobe is surging ahead with a partner model approach in their existing tools, plus fully customisable, governed and IP safe creative AI, while Canva is offering its own IP safe creative AI models into the free Affinity suite as a way to drive broader licensing of the Canva cloud platform.
Standout: ‘VENDORiQ: Will China be the Key to Enabling Australian Sovereign AI?’ IBRS, 2025
Special Mention: ‘VENDORiQ: Industrial AI Agents – The Battle for Enterprise Workflow Automation Intensifies,’ IBRS, 2025
Special Mention: ‘VENDORiQ: Canva’s Creative OS is a Strategic Attack on Adobe’s Fortress’, IBRS, November 2025.
Your Next Step: Back to Basics, Please!
We saw a lot of amazing tech, but the takeaway remains simple: the only thing that changes faster than AI is the vendor narrative.
To secure real, lasting value, you must get beyond the AI rhetoric and return to the fundamentals that truly matter: budget controls, robust governance, strong security (especially for agents), and relentless focus on delivering measurable value to the business. Business and ICT strategists need to take back control by seeing AI as a tool, not a cure-all. It’s more important now than ever to understand the organisational context, business capability model, create strong business cases, map processes, know our customers’ journeys, grasp our architecture, govern data, and manage change, including improving digital literacy and skills.
