H1 2026 earnings season informed the story distributors wished informed: AI connect charges climbing, cloud backlog compounding, and platforms increasing into adjoining workflows.
ServiceNow sustained roughly 19% subscription development whereas growing its 2026 AI dedication to $1.5 billion. Salesforce grew Agentforce annual recurring income to $1.2 billion, whilst core income development slowed into the only digits. SAP reported roughly 30% Cloud ERP suite development in fixed forex. Whereas the numbers are spectacular, they don’t show buyer worth and don’t inform the total story.
Beneath the expansion narrative, enterprise software program distributors are rewriting the phrases of purchaser leverage, and they’re doing it whereas prospects deploy, not whereas they negotiate. In reality, there are three necessary shifts in purchaser leverage that CIOs want to arrange for now, earlier than the following renewal:
- Right now’s consumption pricing is turning into the brand new ground for software program renewals. Credit, models, and utilization tiers give consumers flexibility throughout deployment — additionally they give distributors a baseline at renewal. Consumption pricing lowers obstacles to adoption, however over time, utilization patterns change into reference factors for budgeting, forecasting, and future negotiations. Each ungoverned pilot can change into subsequent yr’s dedicated ground. It’s important for CIOs to safe spending controls, rollover rights, metering transparency, and unit-price protections whereas utilization stays sufficiently small to barter.
- Management of AI worth measurement is turning into one other supply of leverage. Vendor-reported AI metrics are designed to show momentum to buyers and, in fact, to form the general narrative. They need consumers to just accept the narrative. However metrics about adoption or exercise say little about effort eliminated, price averted, high quality improved, or enterprise outcomes achieved. Measure AI in opposition to operational outcomes, not adoption statistics, otherwise you threat funding another person’s success story. Don’t give attention to what number of credit had been consumed or what number of brokers had been activated — give attention to whether or not AI helps you full work quicker, higher, or at decrease price.
- Workflow dependency is turning into the brand new lock-in. Switching prices are transferring out of databases and into orchestration logic, semantic fashions, configurations, permissions, and agent habits. Your information could also be moveable. Your workflows more and more should not. As AI turns into embedded inside enterprise processes, portability turns into an working concern, not merely a technical one. CIOs ought to be certain that workflow definitions, orchestration artifacts, semantic mappings, and agent histories stay as moveable because the underlying information.
Make Vendor Dependency An Government Choice
Of all of the shifts in purchaser leverage, workflow dependency is the one CIOs must be probably the most involved about as a result of it impacts general technique, platform decisions, and architectural decisions. Not all dependencies are unhealthy. Standardized platforms can speed up deployment, simplify governance, and scale back integration complexity. The error is accepting dependency with out understanding each its worth and its exit price.
Over the following 90 days, determine the 5 AI-enabled workflows probably to change into operationally important. Calculate the worth they create, the consumption publicity they generate, and the price of reconstructing them elsewhere. Then classify each dependency as intentional, negotiable, or unacceptable. Scale the dependencies that supply worth and that justify their price; reset the pricing, utilization, or exit phrases on these price holding; and cease funding the remaining.
From right here, CIOs must work with your complete ecosystem. CIOs and their expertise leaders should personal consumption telemetry (e.g., credit consumed, API calls, tokens used, agent invocations, and so forth.) whereas partnering with each sourcing leaders, who should personal portability and renewal protections in contract negotiations, and finance leaders, who can implement spending ceilings. Some degree of vendor lock-in goes to be unavoidable, however each concession of flexibility should include measurable enterprise benefit and, extra importantly, buyer worth.
AI is altering the phrases of the deal between consumers and distributors. It’s figuring out who captures the financial worth created by AI. That energy compounds quietly, quarter by quarter, inside selections which are not often framed as negotiations. It’s on CIOs to make certain that they perceive precisely which dependencies they’re creating, what these dependencies are price, and what it might price to stroll away.
Forrester shoppers ought to learn our detailed report and schedule a steering session. We’ll assist determine the place leverage has already shifted, the place it stays recoverable, and the place governance actions right this moment can stop business constraints tomorrow.
Due to the contributions and experience of our crew that helped form the evaluation, insights, and suggestions introduced on this report: Stephanie Balaouras, Kate Leggett, Leslie Joseph, Joe Cicman, Akshara Naik Lopez, George Lawrie, and Hannah Murphy.
