Enterprise software giants weaponize AI to kill discounts and deepen lock-in The largest enterprise application vendors are using their entrenched positions among customers to end discounting and push high-margin AI products, an analysis by Forrester Research has warned. A study of recent Q2 2025 earnings announcements by the tech research biz found the message from major enterprise software players …
In my head, it really is very simple. If you are running your business on anything remotely cloudy (IAAS, PAAS, SAAS, whatever), then you do not own your business, you are renting it. As soon as you find yourself unable or unwilling to meet the rent payments, you have no business.
The same is true to a lesser extent for propriety software. Once a vendor has their hooks deeply embedded in your processes they are at liberty to give a sharp yank at any point, tearing money leaking wounds all across your business.
Rosie
> If you are running your business on anything remotely cloudy (IAAS, PAAS, SAAS, whatever), then you do not own your business, you are renting it. As soon as you find yourself unable or unwilling to meet the rent payments, you have no business.
True, but not that simple.
Running everything you need on-prem saddles your business with the cost of the datacenter needed for that (maybe just a rack in a closet) plus, much more costly, building and keeping all that know-how from the hardware and cabling, network firewalls, HW installation, backups, maintenance, redundancy, up to technical compliance and the stuff you actually call your business.
Been there, done that.
Especially the personnel and redundancy needed for sustained know-how keeping can be a financially very unattractive trade-off for SMEs.
Same is true for your shop itself. Most businesses rent their stores/offices, not build the houses needed for that themselves.
The point is:
It can be a sound financial decision to use cloud to rent IT infrastructure for your business, but you must make sure you stay flexible enough to move your workloads around, just as you switch offices if the current landlord raises your rent too much.
And you can't stay flexible when using tools that result in lock-in.
AI is now used to enhance variable pricing in products as diverse as residential rentals and airline seats. (For all I know its probably in everything else, it seems to be the primary business model for AI vendors) ("You need out products to enhance your profits -- and if you don't use them your competitors will").
All this efficiency doesn't actually add anything to productive output, its more like a tax. Like any tax if its at a low level then people don't really notice but profit growth has to be maintained so eventually you get to the point where the drive for efficiency ends up strangling the business. Its one thing to be a nation of shopkeepers but shopkeepers not only have to have products to sell but also customers able to buy them.
Lock-in has always been a sign of using force to prevent customers from leaving, indicating your product is so bad they'd consider that to begin with.
So rather than fixing the cause, you tape over it with unethical short term optimization, not really sign of intelligence, because the long term solution will win out.
Using 'AI' to do something unintelligent, is then rather poetic.
