Enterprise software is about to get personal

In 2025, software engineering underwent profound change. A new generation of AI models (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex), paired with a maturing agentic infrastructure, crossed an invisible capability threshold. By the end of the year, developers moved from “AI helps me write code I carefully review” to “I can orchestrate teams of agents that automate most of the development process.” What made it happen wasn’t smarter models, but the infrastructure around them finally catching up. The rest of the enterprise world is next. But most industries aren’t close to being ready, especially one of the world’s most important: retail. In order to understand current retail data challenges, it is helpful to take a step back and examine where enterprise software has been. The same forces that reshaped many other industries are converging on retail, but with even higher stakes. PHASE ONE: THE SYSTEM OF RECORD In the 1990s, enterprise resource planning systems solved a real problem for retailers. SAP and Oracle each promised one system, standardized data, and consistent processes. It worked, but implementations took years, armies of consultants, and systems so rigid they couldn’t keep pace with the market. By the time data were clean, the world had shifted. PHASE TWO: THE SAAS EXPLOSION The cloud era democratized procurement. We could spin up a SaaS tool in days. But the side effect was severe fragmentation. The average enterprise today runs 275 to 342 SaaS applications, more than doubling usage over the past five years, with no shared data layer and no consistent logic. Cloud data warehouses added powerful infrastructure for IT, but nothing for the retail business users who needed an answer by Monday morning. Storing everything in Snowflake doesn’t tell a category manager what to do at their biggest retail account next quarter. PHASE THREE: PERSONAL ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE AI automates tasks, but also enables nontechnical people to build software. A demand planner, trade marketer, or categ