For the last decade, the promise of the cloud and SaaS was one of openness. A world of APIs, integrations, and vibrant app ecosystems where you could connect best-of-breed tools to build your perfect technology stack. Your most trusted partners—Salesforce, Oracle, SAP—were the centers of these ecosystems, encouraging development on their platforms.

That era is over.

A quiet but seismic shift is underway, and if you're a business leader, it needs to be at the top of your agenda. As Tomasz Tunguz of Theory Ventures recently highlighted, the rise of AI has forced these incumbents into a new, defensive posture. They are no longer building open platforms; they are building fortified kingdoms. And your company's data is the crown jewel they are locking inside the castle walls.

This has created a new, more acute form of "platform risk" that threatens the single most important strategic initiative of our time: your company's adoption of AI. Understanding this new landscape is no longer an IT issue; it is a C-suite imperative.

The Great Reversal: Why Your "Partners" Are Building Walls

To understand the danger, we must first understand the incumbents' motivation. For years, their strategy was offensive. By opening their APIs, they attracted thousands of developers to build niche applications on their platforms (think of Salesforce's AppExchange). This created a powerful network effect, making their core System of Record (SOR) even stickier.

But AI changes the calculus entirely.

AI's currency is not software; it's context. The predictive power and workflow automation of any AI model are directly proportional to the quality and volume of the proprietary data it's trained on. Your SORs—holding decades of your customer interactions, financial records, and supply chain data—are the richest deposits of context on the planet.

As Tunguz notes, these giants now recognize their "survival cannot be taken for granted." A nimble AI-native startup could, in theory, leverage your data (with your permission) to create a superior, AI-powered experience that makes the legacy SOR obsolete.

To prevent this, they have reversed their strategy from offense to defense. They are "fighting for context" by building financial and technical walls around your data, ensuring that the only powerful AI used on your data is their AI.

Quantifying the New Platform Risk: The Walls Get Higher

This risk isn't theoretical; it's quantifiable and growing daily. Here’s why the danger is more acute now than ever before:

• The "AI Tax" is Real and Expensive: Incumbents are making it prohibitively expensive to use anyone else's AI. Salesforce's premium AI add-ons can cost upwards of $125 to $550 per user, per month*. For a company with 1,000 employees on an enterprise plan, that's an additional $1.5 million to$6.6 million per year*. This "AI Tax" is the price of admission to use their AI on your data, effectively pricing out competitors and locking you into their roadmap.

  
  

• The Cost of Escape is Astronomical: The lock-in is not just about new fees; it's about the immense, often prohibitive, cost of leaving. A 2023 report from Panorama Consulting Group found that the average ERP implementation costs 7.5% of a company's annual revenue and can take over 24 months. For a$500 million company, that's a $37.5 million* project fraught with risk of business disruption. This massive switching cost gives incumbents enormous leverage to dictate terms.

  
  

• Data Egress Fees Create a Financial Moat: Beyond the application layer, the cloud infrastructure providers that host these SORs (often the same companies) charge significant "data egress" fees for moving your data out of their environment. These fees can run into the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, acting as another financial penalty for trying to use your own data with external tools.

  
  

• Acquisition as a Weapon: Incumbents are actively buying up the escape routes. When Salesforce acquires a data integration company like MuleSoft or Informatica, they are not just buying technology; they are buying control over the pipes that move data in and out of their kingdom. Each acquisition closes another door for independent AI companies and further solidifies the walls of the garden.

  
  

The Incumbent Playbook: How Your Data Is Being Locked Up

Each of the major players has its own flavor of this strategy, but the goal is the same: ensure your data powers their AI, not yours.

• Salesforce: The master of the ecosystem pivot. Having built the world's largest business app marketplace, they are now leveraging that position to push their own AI. By bundling expensive Einstein and Agentforce tools and acquiring integration layers, they are creating a powerful incentive to keep your data and your AI workflows entirely within the Salesforce cloud. The message is clear: innovation is welcome, as long as it happens inside their walls and pays their tax.

  
  

• Oracle: The original walled garden. Oracle's entire history is built on owning the full stack, from the database to the application. Their AI strategy is a natural extension of this. They are embedding AI features directly into their Fusion and NetSuite applications, powered by data within the Oracle database. They make it seamless to use their AI on their platform, but technically and contractually difficult to extract that same rich, transactional data for use in a competing AI model or a separate data warehouse.
  

• SAP: The central nervous system for global industry. SAP's strategy revolves around its S/4HANA platform and the Business Technology Platform (BTP). They are aggressively pushing customers to use BTP as the exclusive integration and extension layer. This means that to connect a third-party AI tool to your core SAP data, you must go through their controlled gateway. This gives them total visibility and control, allowing them to prioritize their own AI services (like SAP Joule) and potentially throttle or limit competing applications.

  
  

The C-Suite Mandate: How to Avoid Becoming a Data Hostage

As a business leader, you cannot afford to be passive. Allowing your most critical asset—your data—to be locked away by a third party is a catastrophic strategic error. You must act now to ensure your company's future is not dictated by your vendors' defensive strategies.

1. Conduct a Data Contract Audit: Go beyond the master service agreement. Task your legal and IT teams to review the fine print on API access, data usage rights, and terms of service for all your major SaaS partners. What are your explicit rights to your own data? What are the limits on API calls? Can they change these terms unilaterally?

   
   

2. Calculate Your True Cost of AI Adoption: Your CFO needs a new model. The cost is not just the license for an AI tool. It's the potential "AI Tax" from your SOR + the data egress fees + the cost of engineering workarounds for locked data. Understanding this true, fully-loaded cost will reveal the hidden price of vendor lock-in.

   
   

3. Champion a Sovereign Data Strategy: This is the most critical step. You must treat your company's data as an independent, sovereign asset, not as a feature within someone else's application. This means investing in a central, vendor-agnostic data foundation—like a data lakehouse or a data fabric—that you control. All your systems, including your SORs, should feed into your central data asset, not the other way around.

   
   

The fight for context is here. The great kingdoms of SaaS are raising their drawbridges. The only winning move is to ensure your data—the fuel for your entire AI strategy—resides in a kingdom where you hold the keys.

At Brighthive , we are here to help you build it. Let's partner together to PREVENT your data being held hostage and accelerate your AI adoption strategy while ensuring you're in control of YOUR data kingdom. Get a demo today!

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