AI Agents Revolutionize Enterprise Software: The Dawn of the Agentic Business Fabric

The End Of Business Apps As We Know Them Is Here

AI Will Reinvent Business Applications Into An Agentic Business Fabric AI agents will fundamentally reimagine the mature market of enterprise business applications into an Agentic Business Fabric. This is a transformative architectural paradigm for the next generation of enterprise operations. Today's business models require a fully connected value chain. Yesterday's legacy environments cannot adapt to enable this change. The Agentic Business Fabric not just an evolution of current business applications but a new paradigm designed for autonomous operation, perpetual learning and optimization. It's an integrated network of capabilities where data, AI, workflows, business logic, and user experiences are deeply interwoven. It consists of 6 core capabilities: The Agentic Business Fabric Changes Everything In Business Operations The agentic business fabric isn't just a technological evolution; it's a fundamental rewiring of the principles of business operations. Eventually, business operations will become completely AI-driven. Jobs to be done will fundamentally shift; org structures will be flatter and more aligned; monetization will be based on value (consumption and outcomes); partner ecosystems will shift to more strategic work insted of core implementation tasks. How to adopt the Agentic Business Fabric The Agentic Business Fabric will fix the challenges of technical debt, data silos, and slow innovation that plague current IT environments. But the shift won't be easy, and operations will get more complex before they become easier. Read our report and connect via inquiry to understand the details of this architecture; and access Forrester's framework for navigating the path to an agentic enterprise. Learn what you need to do right now to prepare you for this future.

The Agentic Business Fabric Is How AI Will Transform Enterprise Applications

The discussion around the agentic future of enterprise software is stuck on the promise of tech adoption. We're debating the ideas - which large language models to use, how to build agents, and the merits of various data fabric architectures, as if once embraced, you're on the way to success. While important, these conversations miss the point and distract from how these elements will fundamentally change the way business operates. We see organizations making massive tech investments that will ultimately fail to deliver value. Why? Because they're treating this as a silver bullet solution. It's not. The transition to an agentic business fabric future is fundamentally a reinvention of your operating model. Using AI enterprise platforms for internal operations to do what you already do faster is good. Using AI to do things you haven't done before is better. Success hinges on organizational and commercial shifts in business strategy. Forrester's vision of enterprise software applications. The agentic business fabric is an intelligent ecosystem where AI agents, your data, and your employees work together to achieve business outcomes. Instead of users navigating a dozen applications, the fabric orchestrates the necessary capabilities behind the scenes. The goal is to manage the integration of business workflows and make technology invisible, allowing your teams to focus on strategic work, not complex software. Stop Focusing On "What Agents Do." Focus On "How They Decide." Most leaders think about how AI will change existing workflows. High-performing enterprises are already redesigning job descriptions. As agents absorb routine tasks, the value of human employees shifts from 'doing the work' to supervising the system. Your future MVPs will be AI supervisors and process optimizers. These roles require deep domain expertise and data literacy. Are you actively defining these roles with HR? Are you building training programs to upskill your best people? If you wait, your workforce will be unprepared for the new operational reality. Redesign Jobs, Not Just Workflows Most leaders are thinking about how AI will change existing workflows. Higher performing enterprises are already redesigning job descriptions. As agents absorb routine tasks, the value of human employees shifts from 'doing the work' to supervising the system. Your future MVPs will be AI supervisors, exception handlers, and process optimizers. These roles require a hybrid skill set of deep domain expertise, data literacy, and a strong grasp of AI capabilities. Are you actively defining these roles with HR? Are you building training programs to upskill your best people from doers into optimizers? If you wait until the technology is mature, you will have a workforce unprepared for the new operational reality. Your Commercial Models Are Now Obsolete Finally, recognize the new vendor power play. Vendors are using AI urgency to end discounts and reset commercial terms. They sell premium-priced tools, but according to our research, the value is unlocked by your investment in process redesign, not the software. This means the burden of success and most of the cost falls on you. Organizations that fail to build architectural flexibility and financial discipline will find themselves locked into expensive platforms that deliver only theoretical benefits. Strategic Control Is the Real Challenge This AI era is about whether you will maintain strategic control over your digital destiny or surrender it. Leveraging the agentic business fabric requires a coalition of technology, business, finance, and HR leaders. Investing in the functional capabilities is the easy part; transforming how your business operates and captures new forms of value is the real challenge. To dive deeper into the architectural and strategic shifts required, read our new report, The Agentic Business Fabric Will Evolve Enterprise Business Applications. To pressure-test your own strategy, schedule a guidance with us and let's discuss your operating model for the agentic era.

AI is changing everything -- including the future of enterprise software

At the core of this shift is a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) that not only offers insights but also takes action. AI agents are emerging as intelligent operators of business processes, capable of making decisions, completing transactions, and learning from outcomes. This is more than technological progress; it reveals a deep structural transition in how organizations and economies will operate. AI agents embedded in existing workflows and armed with contextually-relevant business data can now reconcile accounts, generate forecasts, schedule maintenance, or even handle customer interactions -- without human prompting but with human oversight. For organizations across industries, the implications are strategic and immediate: operating models will change, competitive moats will be redefined, and the pace of execution will no longer be human-bound. REDEFINING ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE AND THE WAY BUSINESS OPERATES Agentic AI represents a monumental user experience (UX) shift, at least as powerful as the evolution to mobile-friendly touchscreens as smartphones became pervasive. This new paradigm allows applications to truly understand natural language input from humans, rather than requiring people to decipher an app's syntax.

AI is Changing Everything -- Including the Future of Enterprise Software

The enterprise software industry is undergoing its most radical transformation in decades. Once dominated by static systems and manual workflows, it's rapidly evolving into a dynamic, intelligent ecosystem where AI agents and automation are rewriting the rules of business productivity. At the core of this shift is a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) that not only offers insights but also takes action. AI agents are emerging as intelligent operators of business processes, capable of making decisions, completing transactions, and learning from outcomes. This is more than technological progress; it reveals a deep structural transition in how organizations and economies will operate. AI agents embedded in existing workflows and armed with contextually-relevant business data can now reconcile accounts, generate forecasts, schedule maintenance, or even handle customer interactions -- without human prompting but with human oversight. For organizations across industries, the implications are strategic and immediate: operating models will change, competitive moats will be redefined, and the pace of execution will no longer be human-bound. Agentic AI represents a monumental user experience (UX) shift, at least as powerful as the evolution to mobile-friendly touchscreens as smartphones became pervasive. This new paradigm allows applications to truly understand natural language input from humans, rather than requiring people to decipher an app's syntax. For example, the AI agents embedded in Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications are now capable of navigating multi-step processes, making decisions, and exercising judgment to achieve desired business outcomes. The new user experience essentially becomes a conversation, moving beyond traditional graphical user interfaces, touchscreens, and 'point and click' interactions. AI features provide the best results when they can rely upon a common data model as a patchwork of disparate apps requires numerous integrations that reduce the velocity and quality of data feeding AI algorithms. As a result, many software vendors have shifted their strategy from selling "best-of-breed" applications to offering integrated suites. When applications for all of an organization's key business functions -- finance, supply chain, HR, sales, marketing, service -- are working from the same dataset as they do with our Fusion Applications, AI agents can operate more effectively across workflows, grasp business context, adhere to compliance rules, and interact seamlessly across systems. This also streamlines governance, enhances security, and improves data visibility throughout the organization. These agents are not incremental add-ons or productivity hacks. They are not new tools to adopt. They are an opportunity to re-architect the way business operates for resilience, responsiveness, and competitive advantage. Tasks that once took hours -- reconciling accounts, managing approvals, making payments, updating forecasts -- can now happen in seconds, without human initiation. AI agents detect patterns, learn from interactions, and apply business rules automatically, which enables workers to focus on strategy, creativity, and complex problem solving. To deliver on this vision for enterprise applications, software needs to be delivered as-a-service (SaaS) and live in a high-performance cloud environment with optimized networking, massive compute capacity, and autonomous data management features. This is where an SaaS vendor's choice of infrastructure becomes important. Hosting LLM models and delivering AI agent capabilities via third-party infrastructure providers can add more cost and integration complexity. Oracle is the only enterprise software vendor to offer a fully integrated technology stack, from hardware to database to infrastructure to a full suite of cloud applications. This not only provides a significant performance advantage - Oracle Cloud Infrustructure (OCI) is the world's fastest AI infrastructure trusted by leading AI providers (OpenAI, Cohere, NVIDIA, Meta (Llama), xAI (Grok), etc.) - but also gives us a significant cost advantage that allows us to embed AI agents in the workflows of our Fusion Applications at no additional cost to customers. As enterprise AI matures, pricing will become a key enabler -- or barrier -- to adoption. SaaS vendors that force customers to buy premium AI capabilities are making organizations choose between variable (and potentially skyrocketing) costs or an unintelligent and outdated system. In contrast, AI should be a foundational layer to applications, embedded in workflows (and subscriptions) to help accelerate customer adoption and facilitate a continuous feedback loop that refines AI models. This is just the beginning. AI agents are not a market trend -- they are a permanent evolution in how enterprise software functions and will change how businesses and economies operate. Agents will redefine the boundaries of execution, reshape the role of human capital, and introduce a new layer of embedded intelligence that will become central to business value creation. In this new reality, value doesn't come from adding more tools but from activating intelligence inside the systems you already use. The organizations that will succeed will be those that treat AI agents not as peripheral features, but as core infrastructure -- designed into the business from the ground up. As in a world where intelligence is becoming ambient, distributed, and always-on, the question is no longer if your organization will transform -- but whether you will lead the transformation -- or be shaped by those who do. The final deadline for the 2025 Inc. Best in Business Awards is Friday, September 12, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.