For decades, manufacturing was transformed by a single insight: Build only what you need, exactly when you need it. Toyota’s just-in-time model introduced the precision delivery of exactly the right parts, at exactly the right moment, for exactly the right task—eliminating warehouses full of idle inventory and accelerating production. It was one of the most consequential operational shifts of the 20th century.
Enterprise software is about to experience its own JIT moment. And the implications are just as large.
Traditional enterprise applications were built on a simple premise. Define a function (finance, HR, procurement, etc.), build a system around it, and get users to come to that system. For decades, that model has held. ERP, CRM, HCM, SCM. Each application owned its functional domain, and humans navigated between them.
That premise is now collapsing.
IDC’s Agentic Evolution of Enterprise Applications Framework, first published in early 2025, laid out the stages through which software was expected to evolve. Moving through progressive phases, from AI assistant-enhanced applications, to agent-supplemented, to agent-led, and ultimately to agents-as-apps. Now, the next phase is emerging, which IDC refers to as Cross-Application Agents. The concept is simple. AI agents will no longer work inside a single application. They will work across all of them, executing on real-time composability, pulling capabilities, workflows, and data from wherever they live and assembling exactly what the user needs in real time, for that specific outcome.
That is just-in-time software.
In manufacturing, JIT eliminated the cost of excess inventory. In software, JIT eliminates the cost of excess interface. Users no longer navigate to a system. The system comes to them, assembled on demand, hyper-personalized to their role, context, and intent.
Oracle’s recent announcement of 22 Fusion Agentic Applications is a concrete, production example of this model. These are not pre-built applications that users log into. They are cross-application agents created autonomously in real time when needed, combining functionality, workflows, and data from ERP, financials, HCM, CRM, and wherever else the work requires. The application is built in the moment the outcome is requested. And depending on the likelihood that the request will be repeated in the future, the application may also be dissolved when the work is done.
SAP is making the same bet but framing it differently. With Joule as the anchoring AI layer sitting between the user and enterprise execution, users state their business intent, and SAP’s autonomous systems handle the rest. It pulls from the underlying application estate to deliver the outcome without requiring the user to understand which systems provide which pieces of the solution.
Toyota’s JIT model worked because it required a complete rethinking of the supply chain, including clean supplier relationships, reliable APIs between partners, and shared standards that made on-demand assembly possible. The enterprise software equivalent is identical. Cross-application agents require clean APIs, event-driven architectures, semantic data models, and open connectivity standards like MCP that allow agents to discover and orchestrate capabilities across vendors.
Vendors that haven’t invested in that infrastructure will find themselves on the wrong side of a distribution shift that is already underway. Distribution, in the agent era, no longer runs through a UI. It runs through agent marketplaces, connectors, and open protocols. If an agent can’t find your capability, your capability doesn’t exist.
This is not a five-year horizon thought experiment. Our Agentic Evolution of Enterprise Applications Framework places cross-application agents as an emerging reality, with leading vendors already building their initial JIT software solutions. IDC’s updated 2026 framework is scheduled for publication in early August. It will not only show the projected transition timing of the enterprise application market toward JIT software (both in aggregate and within 15+ individual application markets), but it will also break down the pricing model progression that is set to accompany this transformation.
The window for vendors to make their products agent-operable has already begun. APIs must be clean, connectors must be built, and packaging needs to be redesigned around outcomes and consumption, not seats.
For buyers, the shift is equally urgent. The traditional bounds of application markets are becoming transient. The question will no longer be just about which ERP or HCM vendor has the best capabilities. It will be about whether your enterprise architecture can support agents that move freely across it, and whether your software vendor can deliver you the same types of JIT efficiencies that manufacturers started benefiting from nearly 80 years ago. Just-in-time manufacturing didn’t make the parts less important. It made the system that assembled them the competitive advantage. The same logic applies here.
Software that arrives exactly when needed, assembled precisely for the outcome at hand, and drawing from the full capability estate of the enterprise… that is the model that wins.
Eric Newmark is Group Vice President & General Manager of IDC’s SaaS, Enterprise Software, CX, and Workplace Solutions Division, which includes several teams of analysts covering SaaS, 18 enterprise application markets, software monetization, business platforms, marketplaces, and services firms focused…
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