– A Note from Pari Natarajan
By now, you’ve probably seen the obituaries.
2025, we were told, would be the year AI agents finally displaced enterprise software. The industry prepared accordingly. Agent platforms launched. Autonomous workflows were announced. PowerPoint decks adjusted their vocabulary.
Enterprise software, however, did not disappear. What followed instead were pilots, exceptions, and edge cases, the familiar reminder that the hard part isn’t intelligence, but admission: getting new ideas past organizations that have spent decades learning how to protect themselves.
Pari Natarajan, CEO, Zinnov, has spent two decades watching transformation stories collide with that reality. So instead of adding another think piece to the noise, he asked a different question:
What would Enterprise Software say, if it could speak for itself?
From the Desk of
Enterprise Software
February 2026
To Whom It May Concern,
“The report of my demise is greatly exaggerated.”
There’s a lot of noise about how new AI agents are going to be my biggest nemesis. I’ve heard this before. Many times. Here’s why I’ll continue to be omnipresent in the enterprise.
It takes a long time to deploy me. By the time I’m fully operational, several leadership teams have already gone through deeply traumatic experiences. At this point, almost every senior executive in a Global 1000 company has lived through at least one such trauma. They really don’t want to sign up for it again just to replace me with some shiny new AI agent.
I’m also what holds the organization together and shields it from every new CEO’s transformation program. CEOs and transformation agendas come and go. I stay. I quietly safeguard the rigid, inflexible enterprise systems that keep the lights on.
There are plenty of people inside enterprises—and across service providers—whose lives depend on keeping me alive. Any serious attempt to replace me will be fought tooth and nail by powerful enterprise antibodies.
Over the years, I’ve tightly intertwined myself with other systems. You can’t remove one of us without breaking half the enterprise. That’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
I’ve also buried enterprise data deep inside workflows. Good luck separating that data from me to feed your new AI systems. I wish you well.
And let’s not forget—I’m very good at converting my nemesis into one of us. Salesforce once ran a campaign anchored on the mantra “No Software.” Today, they’re very much one of us.
Meanwhile, hedge fund managers dumping my stock have never used anything beyond Excel. They have no idea how deeply I’m embedded as the lifeline of enterprises.
So don’t worry. I’ll continue to be omnipresent in your life.
See you when you fill out your weekly timesheet.
Yours in perpetuity,
As dictated to Pari Natarajan, CEO, Zinnov
What this means for CXOs
If there’s a lesson here, it isn’t that enterprise software is invincible, or that AI agents are overhyped.
It’s that change in large organizations doesn’t arrive as replacement. It arrives as re-allocation of responsibility.
Core systems will continue to do what they’ve always done: record, reconcile, and enforce. AI will increasingly sit around them, observing, interpreting, recommending, and occasionally acting. The real work for leadership is deciding where judgment belongs, and how much autonomy the organization is prepared to absorb.
The companies that struggle won’t be the ones that adopt AI too slowly. They’ll be the ones that confuse experimentation with transformation or assume intelligence alone can undo decades of operational design.
The opportunity isn’t to declare victory over Enterprise Software. It’s to understand it well enough to evolve around it.
That’s the difference between headlines and outcomes.
Talk to us at about where AI should, and shouldn’t, sit in your enterprise.
THANK YOU
FOR YOUR RESPONSE
