The source of truth — what AI agents mean for eBiz (and your group)

You’ll have heard plenty about artificial intelligence lately, and no doubt a fair amount of noise along with it. There’s one part of the debate worth understanding plainly, because it concerns the kind of software your buying group relies on every day.

Start with how software like eBiz is normally paid for. For years, the standard arrangement has been simple: instead of buying a program outright and installing it yourself, you pay a regular subscription to use it. In return, it is kept running, updated, backed up and supported for you. The industry calls this “software as a service” (SaaS). Most tools your business uses work this way: your accounts package, your email, and eBiz itself.

Now bring AI into the picture. Most people know AI as a chatbot — you type a question, it types back an answer. But newer versions can do more than talk; they can carry out tasks on their own. The industry calls these “agents”. Rather than just telling you how to do a job, an agent can go and do it: pull the figures, run the calculation, fill in the form, and see the task through without someone clicking the buttons.

Put those two things together, and some people have reached a dramatic conclusion that the press nicknamed the “SaaSpocalypse” — loosely, “the collapse of the software business”. The idea goes like this: if AI can draft your letters, why pay for Microsoft Word? If it can run formulas, why pay for Excel? And if a computer can handle the work inside a piece of software automatically, why pay for the software at all? Earlier this year, that line of thinking caused investor panic, and the market value of many well-known software companies fell sharply.

It’s a fair thing to wonder about, so here is our honest view: the people predicting the end of software are confusing two very different things. There is the screen — the buttons and forms your team clicks. And there is the system underneath — the place that holds, checks and protects your numbers. Anyone can build a new screen. Almost no one can be trusted to replace the system underneath.

The screen is the easy part

A platform like eBiz isn’t just a collection of screens. The screens are the easy bit. What sits beneath them is the hard part: the authoritative record of every supplier agreement, deal, claim and settlement — reconciled correctly across suppliers, merchants and the group itself, with everyone seeing only what they are allowed to see.

Anyone can build a nice-looking screen. Very few systems can be trusted to hold the numbers that decide who is owed real money.

Agents need a source of truth more than ever

An AI agent is only as good as the data it acts on. Ask an agent to work out this quarter’s rebate and it will give you an answer with complete confidence. Whether that answer is correct depends entirely on whether the figures and rules it pulled from were accurate and current. Feed it flawed data, and you don’t get an error message — you get confident, well-presented nonsense.

When a person makes a mistake in a spreadsheet, someone usually spots it. When an autonomous agent acts on bad data, it can be wrong instantly, at scale, and act on that error — issuing payment requests and closing periods before anyone notices.

In an automated world, cleverness is becoming cheap and common. What is rare is a source of data reliable enough that you can trust an AI to act on it without checking its working.

Why this leaves us

For twenty-five years, eBiz has done one thing above all else: served as the place where a buying group’s truth lives.

That data is uniquely demanding:

• It’s multi-party. It has to be accurate and correctly permissioned for everyone at once.
• It’s financial. “Roughly right” isn’t good enough when payments are on the line.
• It’s auditable. It has to stand up to scrutiny long after the period closes.

An AI agent cannot invent that level of trust on its own. Far from threatening a platform like eBiz, the rise of AI turns our record from something useful in the background into the core foundation everything else depends on.

Building for the future, not defending the past

We aren’t sitting still. We are actively making eBiz agent-ready:

• Safe connections for AI. We are building secure, permissioned ways for trusted AI tools to read and interact with your rebate data — strictly under your control.
• Keeping people in control. We are keeping the interface your teams use. Agents are great at routine, high-volume work, but people are still far better at judgment — reviewing exceptions, approving unusual deals and making close calls.
• Taking our duty seriously. Becoming the foundation for automated decisions is a heavy responsibility. We treat data security, accuracy and permissions as a core duty.

We are investing ahead of the curve so that when your group is ready to modernise — whatever shape that takes — you are standing on a foundation you can rely on completely.

If you’d like to talk about what agent-ready rebate management means for your group, get in touch anytime. We’d love to chat.