Not your usual uncle job: These teens are barbers on the side

Everyone has a go-to person for their hair, and for a growing clientele, the go-to person for their next fade is not a veteran, but 19-year-old Sujaish Kumar or 14-year-old Keanu Akbar. 

While it’s easy to dismiss their work as a hobby, these two students have built successful brands from the ground up, earning recognition online and off—endeavours that gave them purpose after completing their studies. 

Vulcan Post speaks to Sujaish and Keanu to find out how they paved their own way for themselves and other younger barbers in the old school trade.

Both of them picked up barbering by watching online videos 

Getting a decent haircut was often a nightmare for Sujaish. He shared that ‘good barbers’ often charged S$30—out of budget for him and his friends in secondary school—leaving them to patronise shops that provided S$10-S$12 haircuts.

Unfortunately, keeping to that budget mean that the haircuts often came out uneven and messy. ​​Frustrated, Sujaish decided to take matters into his own hands, challenging himself to provide better haircuts. The next day, he started watching tutorials on YouTube and TikTok.

“I had about S$50 saved up, so I just spent that on a pair of clippers. Then I basically had to beg my friends to let me cut their hair.” But even with having the right tools, the execution turned out to be harder than he thought.

“The first few haircuts were really really bad, uneven, and kind of demotivating,” Sujaish sheepishly shared, but that didn’t stop him from continuing to hone his craft, providing free haircuts for family, friends and their acquaintances at his HDB corridor. 

Through word-of-mouth, Sujaish eventually gained a sizable following. Five months after he started, his cuts were good enough for him to charge S$5, which soon rose to S$8 per head. He also began promoting his services on TikTok, and one viral reel further grew his clientele base. 

Even though he had to move his chair to his home upon receiving orders from the Housing Development Board (HDB), he continued making a name for himself online as a young barber, inspiring others, like Keanu, to do the same. 

At the tender age of 12, Keanu was encouraged by his older brother to pick up barbering as a hobby, and he got him a set of tools to help him get started. As it turns out, Keanu’s older brother is friends with Sujaish himself, and that inspired his own suggestion.

Keanu shared a similar learning trajectory: picking up his skills from online tutorials and offering free haircuts for his family and friends to sharpen them. He started charging just S$3 per haircut after a year of practice and performed his services on a staircase at his HDB in Clementi. Word soon spread of his services, which helped him land an interview with local publication AsiaOne, which put his name out to the masses.

But beyond those opportunities, how did they actually sustain beyond the hype—one as long as their veteran seniors? 

Scaling up a word-of-mouth service

While the traditional, word-of-mouth method got them started, both Sujaish and Keanu quickly diversified their reach, leaning heavily into social media, particularly TikTok, to scale up.

Going viral is not an easy feat, but Sujaish achieved just that with a video titled ‘How much I make as a 17-year-old barber in Singapore,’ where he earned S$195 in a single day. This financial transparency not only drew netizens but also attracted Singaporean news outlets Mothership and CNA.

Similarly, Keanu’s interview with Asiaone put him on the radar for more clients. The 14-year-old shared that since the interview, his Telegram subscribers doubled from around 150 to 350, and his TikTok following tripled from approximately 400-500 to 1,200.  

However, viral success came with unforeseen challenges. Sujaish’s video caught the attention of the HDB, who informed him he could no longer operate in the corridor due to potential disturbance to neighbours, prompting him to move operations back inside his home.

Despite the change in settings, Sujaish continued to build his brand and reinvest his earnings for better tools and setups. He has also since raised his starting price to S$30 per haircut and started receiving requests from customers for house calls, where he could get paid a higher price of S$50. 

This additional revenue stream gave Sujaish enough funds to open his own studio at Potong Pasir, which was around 100 sqft, or equivalent to a master bedroom in an HDB flat. While moving to a studio resulted in him forking out more than S$1,000 for flooring, rental and upgrades, he believes it was a gamble worth taking. 

“Even from when I started, my goal was always to have my own private area where I could do my haircuts, and cutting hair at home was disturbing my family.”

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Keanu has also moved his workstation to his home, not because he was told to, but out of a personal desire to provide a more comfortable experience for his clients. “Usually when it rains, I have to cancel my appointments because [my workspace] will get very wet and then people won’t like it.” 

Beyond the fade 

Aside from being able to earn from their side hustle, the trade has also instilled skillsets and qualities that can be used beyond barbering. 

A self-proclaimed introvert, Keanu shared that picking up barbering helped him to gain confidence in engaging with strangers. “When I’m with my friends, I talk a lot. But other than that, I was really quiet in Primary school.”

Time management was also another skill he gained. He shared that he dedicates two and a half hours on selected weekdays and six hours on weekends, with the remainder of the time spent on his studies and leisure with family and friends. 

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“Maybe I’m not living like the full 14-year-old, but I don’t mind it.” 

For Sujaish, barbering has allowed him to learn the foundations of building a business, from marketing himself to learning the operations. These allowed him to have an ambition to work towards opening a full-fledged barbershop and even starting a haircare brand.

Overall, both of them showed a new age of barbers that bring modern trends and tactics to a trade once seen as an “old man’s job” into a career still relevant in the modern world. 

• Learn about our protagonists here:
• Read more stories we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: Sujaish Kumar/ Keanu Akbar 

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Hot on the heels of AGDQ in January, Games Done Quick is hosting its second speedrunning event of the year, Back to Black 2026, starting tomorrow, February 5. The four-day event is organized by Black in a Flash and is raising money for Race Forward, a nonprofit that works across communities to address systemic racism.

Back to Black is timed to the start of Black History Month and highlights the deep bench of talent in the Black speedrunning community. A few runs, like ones for Hades II, Donkey Kong Country and Silent Hill 4, were teased when Back to Black 2026 was announced last year. The full schedule has plenty of other runs worth checking out, though, like a co-op run through Plants vs Zombies: Replanted on February 5 or an Any% run of The Barbie Diaries: High School Mystery on February 6.

Back to Black 2026 will be live on Games Done Quick’s Twitch and YouTube channels from Thursday, February 5 through Sunday February 8.

Tinder is turning to a new AI-powered feature, Chemistry, to help it reduce so-called “swipe fatigue,” a growing problem among online dating users who are feeling burned out and are in search of better outcomes.

Introduced last quarter, the Match-owned dating app said that Chemistry leverages AI to get to know users through questions and, with permission, accesses their Camera Roll on their phone to learn more about their interests and personality.

On Match’s Q4 2026 earnings call, one analyst from Morgan Stanley asked for an update on the product’s success so far.

Match CEO Spencer Rascoff noted that Chemistry was still only being tested in Australia for the time being, but said that the feature offered users an “AI way to interact with Tinder.” He explained that users could choose to answer questions to then “get just a single drop or two, rather than swiping through many, many profiles.”

In addition to Chemistry’s Q&A and Camera Roll features, the company plans to use the AI feature in other ways going forward, the CEO also hinted.

Most importantly, Rascoff said the feature is designed to combat swipe fatigue — a complaint from users who say they have to swipe through too many profiles to find a potential match.

The company’s turn toward AI comes as Tinder and other dating apps have been experiencing paying subscriber declines, user burnout, and declines in new sign-ups.

In the fourth quarter, new registrations on Tinder were still down 5% year-over-year, and its monthly active users were down 9%. These numbers show some slight improvements over prior quarters, which Match attributes to AI-driven recommendations that change the order of profiles shown to women, and other product experiments.

Match said that this year, it aims to address common Gen Z pain points, including better relevance, authenticity and trust. To do so, the company said it is redesigning discovery to make it less repetitive and is using other features, like Face Check — a facial recognition verification system — to cut down on bad actors. On Tinder, the latter led to a more than 50% reduction in interactions with bad actors, Match noted.

Tinder’s decision to start moving away from the swipe toward more targeted, AI-powered recommendations could have a significant impact on the dating app. Today, the swipe method, which was popularized by Tinder, encourages users to think that they’re choosing a match from an endless number of profiles. But in reality, the app presents the illusion of choice, since matches have to be two-way to connect, and even then, a spark is not guaranteed.

The company delivered an earnings beat in the fourth quarter, with revenue of $878 million and EPS of 83 cents per share above Wall Street estimates. But weak guidance saw the stock decline on Tuesday, before rising again in premarket trading on Wednesday.

Beyond AI, Match will also increase its product marketing to help boost Tinder engagement. The company is committing to $50 million in Tinder marketing spend, which will include creator campaigns on TikTok and Instagram, where users will make claims that “Tinder is cool again,” Rascoff noted.

When researchers ask students to test educational technology products, a consistent pattern emerges: Tools that impress adults in demos often fall flat with the students who actually use them. Recent studies show that even well-designed products can frustrate students or create unnecessary mental strain when technical complexity gets in the way of learning. The disconnect means even promising tools aren’t reaching their full potential in real classrooms.

This gap between adult expectations and student experience is exactly what ISTE+ASCD, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and the youth research organization In Tandem aim to close through their collaborative work on student usability in edtech.

EdSurge spoke with three leaders from this collaborative effort: Vanessa Zuidema, co-founder and director of customer success at In Tandem; Dr. Medha Tare, senior director of research at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center; and Dr. Brandon Olszewski, senior director of research and innovation at ISTE+ASCD.

“To help clarify what matters most when it comes to student usability, we knew we needed to work with these partners to reach students, check our findings against others in the space and develop guidance for edtech providers,” Olszewski explains. “Sesame has extensive experience designing for young people and balancing high-quality learning with engagement. In Tandem connects young people with companies and organizations that need their voices at the table. ISTE+ASCD sits at the intersection of educational technology, learning design, and curriculum and instruction.”

Ahead of releasing a formal student usability framework later this year, the three organizations shared early findings about what students actually want from educational technology — and what it means for schools and developers.

EdSurge: Why focus specifically on student usability, and what does that mean in practice?

Tare: The field is very good at evaluating edtech from an adult perspective: alignment, evidence, safety, interoperability. But none of those frameworks capture what it’s like to be a kid trying to use a tool in real time.

In our research with students and product developers, we often saw cognitive load issues: students struggle with instructions, navigation or unclear affordances. We saw motivation issues: kids shut down when a feature feels intimidating or frustrating. Many existing evaluations don’t examine how struggling, multilingual or reluctant readers experience the same product quite differently.

Zuidema: While districts, school leaders and teachers all play critical roles, ultimately the student experience determines whether learning actually happens. Yet too often, product development processes overlook the people most affected: students themselves.

How does centering student voice change the way edtech products are designed?

Tare: You can count on young people to surface things adults would never catch. Kids are the experts in fun, not adults! In one case, an AI writing companion talked too much, repeated questions and “felt like a bot” to kids. Students redesigned the personality system to be less chatty, more responsive and more playful, and engagement shot up the next day.

In another case, developers initially assumed a read-aloud feature would help with assessment, but kids were often too anxious or unsure to speak. Student discomfort fundamentally shifted how developers approached assessment supports.

Zuidema: When you center student voice, you learn things about an edtech tool that adults simply can’t see. Testing early ideas with students helps product teams figure out if things like onboarding or screen design actually work before a tool is used in real classrooms. This keeps teams from building features based on adult guesses and saves them from costly rebuilds.

One example is customization. Adults often assume students want lots of choices in how everything looks. But many students say they prefer simple, steady designs and want more control over their learning path instead.

Olszewski: I’m generalizing here, but what we heard is that they don’t care about chatbots, and they don’t want to do anything for school on their phones except check due dates. I think these insights offer edtech providers some solid guidance on how to spend their energy when developing products.

What do students want from edtech?

Olszewski: Students want a clean user interface that feels intuitive, as if it were actually tested by real students. They don’t care about a lot of add-ons, advanced customization, badges and points. Instead, they want clear learning progressions that show them what’s next. They want to see language and scenarios that reflect who they are.

Zuidema: Students want tools that are simple to use, don’t waste time and feel made for how they actually learn. They want tools that let them move at their own pace and get feedback that actually makes sense.

Tare: Students want feedback that feels human and helpful: timely, specific, supportive and aligned to where they are in the process. For example, kids told one writing tool not to give grammar feedback while they were still generating ideas because it felt disruptive and demotivating. They want characters and tools that react to them in joyful, surprising ways. And they want tools that respect their intelligence: kids reject infantilizing features and lean into tools that challenge them while also supporting them.

What does it take to do rigorous, ethical student-centered usability research?

Zuidema: Conducting rigorous research with students starts with creating spaces where young people feel safe enough to be honest. When that trust is in place, they move beyond polite answers and offer the kind of deeper feedback that improves programs and products.

Organizations partner most effectively when they start with a clear sense of what they hope to learn and how they plan to use those insights. When students feel safe and respected, they offer the kind of honest, deeper insight that strengthens the work.

Tare: We recommend genuine youth partnership, not tokenism: Kids need time to build relationships, trained facilitators and multiple sessions to share deeper feedback. And there needs to be a willingness to change course: Product teams need to be ready to iterate, and sometimes to do so fundamentally. Kids are experts! We need to listen.

Olszewski: Young people under 18 rightfully are afforded special protections through Institutional Review Boards. Coordinating with the right organizations that have streamlined that work helps responsible research partners get right to the work of actually collecting data. That’s so helpful when the people we want to learn from don’t yet have a driver’s license!

How should school leaders evaluate edtech through the lens of student usability?

Olszewski: We know that alignment to standards and evidence supporting better student learning outcomes are top of mind — and those priorities can sometimes overshadow other important factors. We believe that products designed for usability, both for teachers and students, are more likely to improve teaching and learning. Our forthcoming student usability framework will provide concrete criteria for evaluating these factors. If your sandbox account of a product offers a jumbled user experience without a clear learning progression, that’s a signal it might not work well in practice.

Tare: Student usability should be given strong consideration. We advise school leaders to ask questions such as: Can students independently navigate the tool? Do multilingual learners and struggling readers experience friction? Does the tool maintain motivation, or diminish it? How does feedback feel to a child: supportive or punitive? This approach helps leaders choose tools that work for the students they actually serve.

Learn more: ISTE+ASCD’s student usability framework will be released later this year. In the meantime, educators and edtech decision-makers can explore ISTE’s Teacher Ready Evaluation Tool and related resources at iste.org/edtech-product-selection.

Before Claude Code wrote its first line of code, Vercel was already in the vibe coding space with its v0 service.

The basic idea behind the original v0, which launched in 2024, was essentially to be version 0. That is, the earliest version of an application, helping developers solve the blank canvas problem.  Developers could prompt their way to a user interface (UI) scaffolding that looked good, but the code was disposable. Getting those prototypes into production required rewrites.

More than 4 million people have used v0 to build millions of prototypes, but the platform was missing elements required to get into production. The challenge is a familiar one with vibe coding tools, as there is a gap in what tools provide and what enterprise builders require. Claude Code, for instance, generates backend logic and scripts effectively, but does not deploy production UIs within existing company design systems while enforcing security policies

This creates what Vercel CPO Tom Occhino calls “the world’s largest shadow IT problem.” AI-enabled software creation is already happening inside every enterprise. Credentials are copied into prompts. Company data flows to unmanaged tools. Apps deploy outside approved infrastructure. There’s no audit trail.

Vercel rebuilt v0 to address this production deployment gap. The new version, generally available today, imports existing GitHub repositories and automatically pulls environment variables and configurations. It generates code in a sandbox-based runtime that maps directly to real Vercel deployments and enforces security controls and proper git workflows while allowing non-engineers to ship production code.

“What’s really nice about v0 is that you still have the code visible and reviewable and governed,” Occhino told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. “Teams end up collaborating on the product, not on PRDs and stuff.”

This shift matters because most enterprise software work happens on existing applications, not new prototypes. Teams need tools that integrate with their current codebases and infrastructure.

How v0’s sandbox runtime connects AI-generated code to existing repositories

The original v0 generated UI scaffolding from prompts and let users iterate through conversations. But the code lived in v0’s isolated environment, which meant moving it to production required copying files, rewriting imports and manually wiring everything together.

The rebuilt v0 fundamentally changes this by directly importing existing GitHub repositories. A sandbox-based runtime automatically pulls environment variables, deployments and configurations from Vercel, so every prompt generates production-ready code that already understands the company’s infrastructure. The code lives in the repository, not a separate prototyping tool.

Previously, v0 was a separate prototyping environment. Now, it’s connected to the actual codebase with full VS Code built into the interface, which means developers can edit code directly without switching tools.

A new git panel handles proper workflows. Anyone on a team can create branches from within v0, open pull requests against main and deploy on merge. Pull requests are first-class citizens and previews map directly to real Vercel deployments, not isolated demos.

This matters because product managers and marketers can now ship production code through proper git workflows without needing local development environments or handing code snippets to engineers for integration. The new version also adds direct integrations with Snowflake and AWS databases, so teams can wire apps to production data sources with proper access controls built in, rather than requiring manual work.

Vercel’s React and Next.js experience explains v0’s deployment infrastructure

Prior to joining Vercel in 2023, Occhino spent a dozen years as an engineer at Meta (formerly Facebook) and helped lead that company’s development of the widely-used React JavaScript framework.

Vercel’s claim to fame is that its company founder, Guillermo Rauch, is the creator of Next.js, a full-stack framework built on top of React. In the vibe coding era, Next.js has become an increasingly popular framework. The company recently published a list of React best practices specifically designed to help AI agents and LLMs work.

The Vercel platform encapsulates best practices and learnings from Next.js and React. That decade of building frameworks and infrastructure together means v0 outputs production-ready code that deploys on the same infrastructure Vercel uses for millions of deployments annually. The platform includes agentic workflow support, MCP integration, web application firewall, SSO and deployment protections. Teams can open any project in a cloud dev environment and push changes in a single click to a Vercel preview or production deployment.

With no shortage of competitive offerings in the vibe coding space, including Replit, Lovable and Cursor among others, it’s the core foundational infrastructure that Occhino sees as standing out.

“The biggest differentiator for us is the Vercel infrastructure,” Occhino said. “It’s been building managed infrastructure, framework-defined infrastructure, now self-driving infrastructure for the past 10 years.”

Why vibe coding security requires infrastructure control, not just policy

The shadow IT problem isn’t that employees are using AI tools. It’s that most vibe coding tools operate entirely outside enterprise infrastructure. Credentials are copied into prompts because there’s no secure way to connect generated code to enterprise databases. Apps deploy to public URLs because the tools don’t integrate with company deployment pipelines. Data leaks happen because visibility controls don’t exist.

The technical challenge is that securing AI-generated code requires controlling where it runs and what it can access. Policy documents don’t help if the tooling itself can’t enforce those policies.

This is where infrastructure matters. When vibe coding tools operate on separate platforms, enterprises face a choice: Block the tools entirely or accept the security risks. When the vibe coding tool runs on the same infrastructure as production deployments, security controls can be enforced automatically.

v0 runs on Vercel’s infrastructure, which means enterprises can set deployment protections, visibility controls and access policies that apply to AI-generated code the same way they apply to hand-written code. Direct integrations with Snowflake and AWS databases let teams connect to production data with proper access controls rather than copying credentials into prompts.

“IT teams are comfortable with what their teams are building because they have control over who has access,” Occhino said. “They have control over what those applications have access to from Snowflake or data systems.”

Generative UI vs. generative software

In addition to the new version of v0, Vercel has recently introduced a generative UI technology called json-render.

v0 is what Vercel calls generative software. This differs from the company’s json-render framework for a true generative UI. Vercel software engineer Chris Tate explained that v0 builds full-stack apps and agents, not just UIs or frontends. In contrast, json-render is a framework that enables AI to generate UI components directly at runtime by outputting JSON instead of code. 

“The AI doesn’t write software,” Tate told VentureBeat. “It plugs directly into the rendering layer to create spontaneous, personalized interfaces on demand.”

The distinction matters for enterprise use cases. Teams use v0 when they need to build complete applications, custom components or production software.

They use JSON-render for dynamic, personalized UI elements within applications, dashboards that adapt to individual users, contextual widgets and interfaces that respond to changing data without code changes.

Both leverage the AI SDK infrastructure that Vercel has built for streaming and structured outputs.

Three lessons enterprises learned from vibe coding adoption

As enterprises adopted vibe coding tools over the past two years, several patterns emerged about AI-generated code in production environments.

Lesson 1: Prototyping without production deployment creates false progress. Enterprises saw teams generate impressive demos in v0’s early versions, then hit a wall moving those demos to production. The problem wasn’t the quality of generated code. It was that prototypes lived in isolated environments disconnected from production infrastructure.

“While demos are easy to generate, I think most of the iteration that’s happening on these code bases is happening on real production apps,” Occhino said. “90% of what we need to do is make changes to an existing code base.”

Lesson 2: The software development lifecycle has already changed, whether enterprises planned for it or not. Domain experts are building software directly instead of writing product requirement documents (PRDs) for engineers to interpret. Product managers and marketers ship features without waiting for engineering sprints.

This shift means enterprises need tools that maintain code visibility and governance while enabling non-engineers to ship. The alternative is creating bottlenecks by forcing all AI-generated code through traditional development workflows.

Lesson 3: Blocking vibe coding tools doesn’t stop vibe coding. It just pushes the activity outside IT’s visibility. Enterprises that try to restrict AI-powered development find employees using tools anyway, creating the shadow IT problem at scale.

The practical implication is that enterprises should focus less on whether to allow vibe coding and more on ensuring it happens within infrastructure that can enforce existing security and deployment policies. 

CATL’s innovative 5C battery claims to revolutionize the electric vehicle industry for drivers. CATL, or Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited, the world’s largest battery manufacturer, claims that a full charge takes only 12 minutes and has a lifespan of over a million miles.

The engineers at CATL worked on this battery to see if it could withstand a 5C charge (basically, an 80-kilowatt-hour pack could be charged at 400 kilowatts in roughly 12 minutes) without quickly wearing out. Yes, according to some estimations, a top-up would take about the same amount of time as filling up with gas, but this battery would withstand wear and tear better.

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Under normal conditions, at 68°F (20°C), it retained at least 80% of its original capacity after 3,000 full charge-discharge cycles. When you add the figures up, that’s more than 1.8 million kilometers, or almost one and a half million miles. Or, in the blistering heat of 140°F (60°C) during the summer in Dubai, it managed 80% after 1,400 cycles, or almost 840,000 kilometers and a half million miles. CATL believes this is six times better than the current industry average for batteries put through a similar test.

So how did they manage to accomplish all of this? For starters, the cathode has a unique covering that keeps the battery from breaking down and losing metal ions during rapid charging and discharging. Second, the electrolyte contains an additive that detects and seals tiny breaches, preventing harmful lithium from leaking out and shortening battery life. Last but not least, there is a particular temperature-responsive coating on the separator that slows down the ions when things get heated locally, all of which contributes to a lower risk of things getting out of control.

Heat becomes considerably more of a concern when charging quickly. So they created a clever system that monitors the pack as a whole and precisely distributes coolant to the hotspots, keeping temperatures consistent across all cells and effectively adding years to the lifespan.

All of this implies that the battery no longer wears out as quickly when charging at high speeds. CATL believes it’s ideal for heavy users, large trucks, taxis, and ride-hailing vehicles. They will be the ones who gain from faster turnaround times and lower replacement prices. Passenger cars will follow once production begins, but there is no news on when the 5C variant will be available. Previous versions, such as the 4C technology released in 2023, were only stepping stones, and this is the next natural step.

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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