Consider this scenario: you’ve decided to buy a new car. The vehicle you want is faster, it has better safety features, battery range, and is more suited to your circumstances than your current coupe. But when you come to pay for it, your bank prevents you from spending your money on your preferred model.
Instead, they insist you buy one from a manufacturer that they own. Sure, it’s not quite the same quality and doesn’t offer the same level of performance as your preferred option — but trust them, they say, it’ll be better for you. Yes, it’s your money, but as custodians of your cash, they’ll only let you spend it as they see fit.
Couldn’t happen, wouldn’t happen, right? Wrong. It’s happening right now to many organizations. It could well be happening to yours. Just swap ‘cars’ for ‘systems,’ ‘money’ for ‘data,’ and ‘banks’ for (some) ‘tech vendors.’
Your fundamental freedom to operate your business is being squeezed by certain tech vendors—companies you’ve probably worked with for years, relied on for core services like ERP and CRM—that have started to erect walls around your critical data.
Slowly and without fanfare, they are imprisoning your data, choking off access, dictating how it’s used, or imposing arbitrary ‘tariffs’ on sharing with third-party applications. This intentional opacity dictates that while it’s your data, they hold the reins. By immuring the data, they are entrapping the processes and denying the transparency necessary for trust.
Trust and transformation in the age of enterprise AI
Transforming business operations by adopting and adapting to any new technology requires trust. Without trust, people resist, bold moves stall, and results are unpredictable. When people trust the process of transformation, resistance fades. So how do you build trust?
Trust is earned through proving competence, building credibility through reliability, showing empathy, and maintaining integrity.
Let’s consider a slightly different aspect of the banking example from above. Why do we trust a bank with our money, and why are we so affronted by the idea that they may not behave fairly with it?
Our trust in the banking industry is centuries old, built on both personal experience and a generational reputation for reliability. Banks prove competence daily, not only to customers but also to regulators who verify their processes and stress-test their resilience. We both choose and reject banks based on their treatment of others and us, on evidence of their integrity and financial stability, and on our perception of how much we matter to them. These data points offer confidence in an uncertain future. Without such data, trust is difficult.
Data is crucial for developing trust, and understanding its origin, context, and trustworthiness is vital. Consider the rise of agentic AI. It’s estimated that by 2028 one-third (33%) of enterprise software applications will include AI agents, enabling as much as 15% of all workplace decisions to be made autonomously.
If AI agents are denied full, business-wide visibility because some data is bricked up in a system’s walled garden, their decision-making quality is diminished and so is employees,’ and potentially customers,’ trust in agentic outputs. Data restriction doesn’t just dilute AI’s performance (and therefore RoAI), it can result in unreliable recommendations, which hampers trust in the transformation. This lack of trust could result in businesses missing out on AI-inspired opportunities, giving away a critical competitive advantage.
Transformation isn’t a gamble, it’s a process that must be freed
The core tenet of the #FreeTheProcess movement is simple: Everyone should be free to make processes work—especially the process of business transformation. When technology vendors create walls and silos, they fundamentally undermine your ability to transform and innovate. This vendor lock-in is a silent saboteur, quietly eroding the transparency and trust required for successful business transformation.
Achieving the vision of AI-driven operations requires knowing where to strategically deploy Enterprise AI. This knowledge comes from the free access to your data and the freedom to reshape the processes underlying your AI solutions. We must all insist on the freedom to own and deploy our data without restriction. It is time to join the movement, decouple your processes from the dictates of your systems, pursue value before vendors, and choose transformation before tools.