Developers return to the places where their tools, workflows, teammates, and accumulated work already live. Enterprises double down on the systems where their data, permissions, governance, and business processes are already connected. Every new integration makes that destination a little harder to leave, and every new workflow increases its pull. That’s what MCP, A2A, etc., are all about: increasing gravity around the models.
Every major AI company wants to become the place where AI-assisted work naturally happens, and they’re now amassing armies of forward deployed engineers and trying other means to get legacy infrastructure to tie back to their frontier models. The enterprise incumbents want the same thing, but from the opposite direction. They don’t need to own the frontier; instead they need to connect the frontier to the systems that already safely run the business.
That’s why I’m skeptical whenever someone confidently predicts that AI will sweep away enterprise software. I’ve seen this movie before. Developers absolutely live on the frontier, but enterprises don’t. Enterprises create value by connecting new capabilities to decades of accumulated applications, data, policies, and business processes. The newest model matters, and so does the newest agent framework. But neither creates much business value until it’s connected to customer records, financial systems, supply chains, HR data, and everything else enterprises already depend on.
