The hidden tax of “Franken-stacks” that sabotages AI strategies

Presented by Certinia

The initial euphoria around Generative and Agentic AI has shifted to a pragmatic, often frustrated, reality. CIOs and technical leaders are asking why their pilot programs, even those designed to automate the simplest of workflows, aren’t delivering the magic promised in demos.

When AI fails to answer a basic question or complete an action correctly, the instinct is to blame the model. We assume the LLM isn’t “smart” enough. But that blame is misplaced. AI doesn’t struggle because it lacks intelligence. It struggles because it lacks context.

In the modern enterprise, context is trapped in a maze of disconnected point solutions, brittle APIs, and latency-ridden integrations — a “Franken-stack” of disparate technologies. And for services-centric organizations in particular, where the real truth of the business lives in the handoffs between sales, delivery, success, and finance, this fragmentation is existential. If your architecture walls off these functions, your AI roadmap is destined for failure.

Context can’t travel through an API

For the last decade, the standard IT strategy was “best-of-breed.” You bought the best CRM for sales, a separate tool for managing projects, a standalone CSP for success, and an ERP for finance; stitched them together with APIs and middleware (if you were lucky), and declared victory.

For human workers, this was annoying but manageable. A human knows that the project status in the project management tool might be 72 hours behind the invoice data in the ERP. Humans possess the intuition to bridge the gap between systems.

But AI doesn’t have intuition. It has queries. When you ask an AI agent to “staff this new project we won for margin and utilization impact,” it executes a query based on the data it can access now. If your architecture relies on integrations to move data, the AI is working with a delay. It sees the signed contract, but not the resource shortage. It sees the revenue target, but not the churn risk.

The result is not only a wrong answer, but a confident, plausible-sounding wrong answer based on partial truths. Acting on that creates costly operational pitfalls that go far beyond failed AI pilots alone.

Why agentic AI requires a platform-native architecture

This is why the conversation is shifting from “which model should we use?” to “where does our data live?“

To support a hybrid workforce where human experts work alongside duly capable AI agents, the underlying data can’t be stitched together; it must be native to the core business platform. A platform-native approach, specifically one built on a common data model (e.g. Salesforce), eliminates the translation layer and provides the single source of truth that good, reliable AI requires.

In a native environment, data lives in a single object model. A scope change in delivery is a revenue change in finance. There is no sync, no latency, and no loss of state.

This is the only way to achieve real certainty with AI. If you want an agent to autonomously staff a project or forecast revenue, it’s going to require a 360-degree view of the truth, not a series of snapshots taped together by middleware.

The security tax of the side door: APIs as attack surface

Once you solve for intelligence, you must solve for sovereignty. The argument for a unified platform is usually framed around efficiency, but an increasingly pressing argument is security.

In a best-of-breed Franken-stack, every API connection you build is effectively a new door you have to lock. When you rely on third-party point solutions for critical functions like customer success or resource management, you’re constantly piping sensitive customer data out of your core system of record and into satellite apps. This movement is the risk.

We’ve seen this play out in recent high-profile supply chain breaches. Hackers didn’t need to storm the castle gates of the core platform. They simply walked in through the side door by exploiting the persistent authentication tokens of connected third-party apps.

A platform-native strategy solves this through security by inheritance. When your data stays resident on a single platform, it inherits the massive security investment and trust boundary of that platform. You aren’t moving data across the wire to a different vendor’s cloud just to analyze it. The gold never leaves the vault.

Fix the architecture, then curate the context

The pressure to deploy AI is immense, but layering intelligent agents on top of unintelligent architecture is a waste of time and resources.

Leaders often hesitate because they fear their data isn’t “clean enough.” They believe they have to scrub every record from the last ten years before they can deploy a single agent. On a fragmented stack, this fear is valid.

A platform-native architecture changes the math. Because the data, metadata, and agents live in the same house, you don’t need to boil the ocean. Simply ring-fence specific, trusted fields — like active customer contracts or current resource schedules — and tell the agent, ‘Work here. Ignore the rest.’ By eliminating the need for complex API translations and third-party middleware, a unified platform allows you to ground agents in your most reliable, connected data today, bypassing the mess without waiting for a ‘perfect’ state that may never arrive.

We often fear that AI will hallucinate because it’s too creative. The real danger is that it will fail because it’s blind. And you cannot automate a complex business with fragmented visibility. Deny your new agentic workforce access to the full context of your operations on a unified platform, and you’re building a foundation that is sure to fail.

Raju Malhotra is Chief Product & Technology Officer at Certinia.

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