The Enterprise AI Coalitions

Yesterday, I explained and dissected to you why a coalition is forming in Enterprise AI, based on the manifesto that Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, had published.

Now, I’ll take a step beyond it to explain which coalitions these are, why they are developing, and why this potentially matters to you, especially if you work, advise, or build for Enterprise AI.

The enterprise AI market is not a diffuse competition of hundreds of vendors. It is a three-way alignment problem in which the industry is quietly resolving into three distinct coalitions, each with a coherent theory of where the moat should live, each with a shipping product signature, each with a structural incentive that makes its argument non-negotiable to its participants.

This is what markets do when a new infrastructure platform matures. In every prior enterprise IT era — mainframe, PC, internet, mobile, cloud — the same pattern emerged: an initial period of vendor proliferation, then a coalition-formation phase in which the market consolidates around two or three structurally opposed theses about where value lives, then a settling phase in which one coalition captures the majority of enterprise budget and the others compress to niche.

Enterprise AI is now in the coalition-formation phase. The vendor proliferation is largely over. The signaling of coalition alignments has begun. The settling has not started.

This piece dissects the three coalitions structurally. For each: who is in it, what its underlying thesis is, what product signature it is shipping, what structural incentive keeps its members aligned, and what vulnerability could fracture it.

The goal is to make the industry’s organization legible — because enterprises architecting AI investments in 2026-2027 are implicitly picking a coalition, and the pick will define what their AI stack looks like for the decade after.