We had a customer conversation a few weeks ago that I keep coming back to. We were talking with them about their AI initiatives and what's on the Kodaris roadmap. They'd also been in sales conversations with a few other AI products on the market, and they'd done the work — a real pros and cons list, feature by feature.
They were honest with us. There was a short list of features another vendor was a little ahead on, or that we didn't have on the roadmap yet. And then they told us they'd rather partner with Kodaris long term anyway. What struck me wasn't that their reasoning was clever - it was that it came from experience. This is a long-term, family business. When you've run something for that long, you think differently about what you tie your operation to. The reasons they gave are worth writing down, because I think a lot of buyers are about to face the same decision.
Here's the first thing they understood. When you embed your workflows with an AI company, you become dependent on that company to run your operations. That's always been somewhat true of software. What's different now is the depth.
AI is going to make your people so efficient that, over time, you won't have enough headcount to run your operation without it. That's not a doomsday take — it's just where the efficiency curve leads. But it means the software you pick isn't a tool sitting off to the side. It becomes the thing your business runs on. So the question of who you pick matters more than it used to, not less.
Now take a brand new AI company, fairly new to the market, and let's look down the road three to five years. A few things can happen. They get acquired, and the product changes. Or one of the big companies — say Anthropic — ships the core features that the vendor was ahead on, and they start losing market share. They begin to spiral, and eventually they're gone or absorbed into something else.
In every one of those branches, you're the one who pays. You're doing change management. You're reimplementing. You're retraining people and rewriting standard operating procedures. All the disruption you were trying to avoid by picking the shiny option shows up anyway, just a couple of years later and on someone else's schedule.
This is a data point every buyer should weigh in a feature comparison. When you buy an AI feature today, you're really buying the future version of it. And the features are iterating so fast they're turning over about every six months. What looks like a lead right now can be obsolete or completely reworked by next year.
You can't run a business that way. You can't change software every six months, change human behavior every six months, and change your operating procedures every six months. People and processesprocess don't move at the speed of a model release. So what you actually need is a provider who will take you on the journey — who keeps the product consistent enough to run your business on while the innovation underneath it keeps changing.
There used to be a saying that you'd never get fired for going with IBM. Buyers went with the safe, entrenched choice because they couldn't go wrong. The tech industry is very different today, and I'm not saying go with the biggest name in the room. But the instinct underneath that saying is still right. Enterprises and customers are betting their business on their software providers, and with AI that bet is getting deeper.
So the real evaluation isn't just “this company has a cool AI feature.” It's whether they also have the business process, the deep entrenchment in your industry, and the years of built-up trust to be there when it counts. A feature gap can close in a release. Trust and entrenchment take years to build and can't be a shortcut.
This is why we don't worry too much when someone is a little ahead on a feature this quarter. We've had the same customers for years, and we release at a breakneck pace — updates every seven days, built around real customer problems. ERP companies that are behind on AI features still have a version of this same advantage, if they can catch up: the entrenchment and the relationship are already there.
There's always going to be a vendor out there with slightly better or slightly different features that look enticing in a demo. That's fine. It comes down to trust, partnership, the long-term relationship, and whether you can count on your partner when the market shifts under both of you.
It's going to be an interesting next five to ten years. There's a lot to evaluate when you're choosing AI solutions, and a feature someone's a little ahead on today is the smallest part of it. The bigger question is who you want next to you while we all navigate the rapid amount of change that's coming.