The cost argument for consolidating enterprise software has existed for a decade and rarely won. The context argument is proving more persuasive.
Fragmentation splits documents, records, decisions and conversations across systems that do not share history. For human teams this is friction. For agent-based systems it is disqualifying: without a coherent context, output cannot be grounded or cited.
That changes the consolidation calculus. The question is no longer how many licences can be retired, but which surfaces must share a single record of what happened.
The counter-risk is familiar to anyone who lived through the monolith era: consolidation without portability creates a new dependency. The credible designs are the ones that publish their exit path.