I used to tell clients that migrating off their CRM was a 12-month project. That number is shrinking fast.
Not because migrations got simpler. The data is still messy. The customizations are still complex. The cutover is still delicate.
But AI agents can now do the part that used to take the most time: mapping schemas, proposing field transformations, flagging data quality issues before you start.
What used to take specialist consultants weeks in spreadsheets now takes hours to get to a first draft. You still need a human to validate it. But the bottleneck is gone.
The switching cost that kept customers on platforms they had outgrown is dissolving.
And vendors know it.
SAP’s April 2026 API policy explicitly bans the category of AI that makes this possible. Salesforce locked down data access for the same reason a year earlier.
The moat used to be accidental. Nobody designed the migration pain. It just emerged from complexity.
The new moat is deliberate.
That is worth paying attention to — whether you are planning a migration or trying to understand why your platform vendor is suddenly very interested in “API stability.”