The Model War is Over. The Deployment War Just Started.

After watching Microsoft Build and Google I/O last week, I came away with one conclusion that is worth saying plainly:

The model war is over. The deployment war just started.

For three years, AI was a benchmark arms race. Every week, a new model became state-of-the-art for about seventeen minutes before the next one arrived wearing a slightly better test score.

Then Build and I/O happened. The biggest announcements weren't smarter models. They were agent identity badges. Agent memory. Agent governance. Microsoft literally announced that AI agents now get corporate identities.

We spent three years debating which AI had the highest IQ. Turns out nobody gave any of them a desk, a login, or a clue how the company actually works.

Here's the gap that no demo shows you: We've built a machine that can pass the bar exam, and now we need someone to show it where the courthouse is. Which judge hates footnotes, why the "approved" SAP instance is actually the legacy one, and that getting sign-off means finding Ramesh in Finance before he disappears for lunch.

That knowledge isn't in any training set. It never will be.

Microsoft. Google. OpenAI. Anthropic. Amazon. They're all racing to become the operating system for enterprise agents. This is the new ERP war.

The enterprises that locked themselves into single-vendor platforms in the 1990s are still paying for those decisions today. The window to stay portable is open. Not for long.

Meanwhile, the IT services industry has spent the last two years listening to its own obituary. Build and I/O suggest the eulogy may have been premature. Because the scarce resource was never intelligence.

It was implementation.

Making capability land inside real organizations with real processes, real politics, real compliance requirements... and, inevitably, three real versions of SAP.

The hardest problem is no longer creating intelligence. The hardest problem is deploying intelligence. The model war created intelligence. The deployment war will create value.