06-11-2026IMPACT COUNCIL

Enterprise software is about to get personal

Each generation built on the failure of the last, but we’re at the start of a new era.

[Photo: Getty Images]

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of top leaders and experts who pay dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership, and more.

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........

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