The platforms are buying their AI
Part two: small AI firms, bolted onto old software
Last week Coveo, the search company, bought Anglera. Anglera is a small Y Combinator startup whose AI agents fill in missing product data for manufacturers and distributors. They pull attributes out of spec sheets, PDFs and supplier files, the work a person used to do by hand.
It was announced at the same B2B commerce show my friend was driving home from when we spoke, and part one has the backstory. My friend spends most of those shows in the hallways with the startups, and the read on them was blunt.
Four startups, one problem
Anglera has company. My friend counts about four startups in B2B alone automating the same unglamorous job: a purchase order arrives as an email or a PDF, and the software turns it into an order in the system without a person retyping it.
They are raising a lot of money. Most of them are solving the same problem. That is a market about to consolidate.
Nobody in that hallway is the next Palantir. Everybody in it is somebody’s next acquisition.
Buy, don’t build
The platforms see it the same way. A software company with a ten-year-old product and a board asking about AI has two choices. It can spend two years building, or it can buy six smart engineers who already built it and put the result on stage at its next keynote.
They are buying. Coveo is the example from last week. There will be another one next week.
Each acquisition makes the platform’s AI story better. It also hands every client one more product that has to work alongside everything else it already owns.
The layer on top
This is the layer I described in Nobody Is Ripping Anything Out, arriving by acquisition. My friend presented the same idea at the show: an orchestration layer that sits over everything the client already runs.
Nobody needs to rip out the commerce platform, and nobody needs to fight it. You put something intelligent on top, built for the way that client actually sells, and let the platform become the plumbing.
The AI gets bolted onto the old platforms one acquisition at a time. Somebody still has to make it work at the client.
Rinse and repeat
I have watched this cycle enough times to know the next step. The big firms will want to work with the Coveos of the world, and they will not know how to implement the dozen small companies the Coveos keep buying.
So $15 million consulting firms will get very good at it. The $500 million firms will buy them, and the holding companies will buy the $500 million firms. Same playbook as content management, same playbook as commerce.
First, what Salesforce itself said about all of this in September. That is part three.
The startups build it.
The platforms buy it.
The consultancies make it work.
A four part series on where B2B consulting goes next.
One. The lead used to come from the platform. Crown, Razorfish, and why the platform-led deal is gone.
Two. The platforms are buying their AI. You are here. Software companies are buying small AI firms instead of building, and somebody still has to make it work.
Three. Salesforce says the UI is going away. The Dreamforce keynote gave up the screens, kept the data and partnered for the intelligence. What that does to the thesis.
Four. Bring the engineer. The consultancies growing fastest sit next to OpenAI, Anthropic and Palantir, and send forward deployed engineers.