Systems of Record Are Dead. Long Live Systems of Record
Why agents aren't replacing the systems that matter—they're raising the bar for what a good one looks like
Every few weeks, someone declares the end of systems of record.
"The agent is the new system of record." "Workflows swallow systems of record." "Data is the system of record; apps are just thin views."
There's a grain of truth in each. But the people making these claims often miss the thing enterprises still need most—not a "system of record" as a product category, but a reliable source of truth.
When I think about systems of record, I don't think in product categories. I think in the boring lens of "where does the truth live." If an enterprise workflow needs to know something at a specific step, where is the one place that answer is considered canonical?
As workflows get more automated and more agent-driven, the fragility point often has nothing to do with the model and everything to do with whether the agent pulled the right value from the right system at the right time. If an early step in a quote-to-cash flow grabs the wrong price list, or the wrong contract term, or a stale ARR number, the rest of the workflow is now confidently automating the wrong thing.
This is where Converge enters the picture—and why we think the "systems of record are dead" narrative gets things exactly backwards.
The Truth Problem Gets Worse, Not Better
Anyone who's spent time inside a large company knows how messy this gets in practice. Take something as simple as "what is our ARR."
Ask sales, you get one number. Ask finance, you get another—with different exclusions and adjustments. Ask accounting, now you're talking revenue recognition, not bookings. Ask legal, and they'll correctly remind you that half the "ARR" in a fast-growing business is backed by contracts that look nothing like the neat recurring subscription you want it to be.
Even the definition is slippery. For a consumption business, is ARR the annualized run rate from last month's usage? Is it contracted commit? Is it contracted commit net of discounts and credits? Or is it a lagging twelve-month billing number dressed up to sound like a recurring metric?
Now imagine telling an agent: "Go calculate ARR by segment and send a deck to the board." Which ARR does it use? Which table is canonical? If sales and finance disagree, who wins? If the billing system and the warehouse have drifted by a few percent, which one does the agent treat as truth?
This is the part of the "systems of record are dead" argument that feels off to me. The more we automate, the more important it becomes that someone has done the unglamorous work of deciding what the correct answer is—and where it lives.
What Agents Actually Change
Historically, systems of record solved this simply. CRM for customers. ERP for financials. HRIS for people. Billing for invoices. Each domain had a primary home. Not perfect, but reliable.
Then everyone tried to centralize into the warehouse. Pour all data into one place, layer semantic models on top, get a single source of truth.
That vision got partway there. Warehouses became the center for analytical truth. Teams built dbt models, governed metrics, curated gold tables.
But most of this lived downstream of the operational world. Sales still lived in Salesforce. Finance still closed books in NetSuite. The warehouse was the retrospective mirror, not the transactional front door.
Agents change that equation in two ways:
They're inherently cross-system. When you tell an agent to "run a quote-to-cash workflow," you're asking it to dance across CRM, CPQ, billing, collections, and maybe a few internal tools that live in random corners of the org.
They're inherently action-oriented. This isn't about running a report or producing a dashboard. It's about taking actions that change state in those underlying systems.
That combination means agents are only as good as their understanding of which system owns which truth—and what the contract is between those truths.
Enter: The Truth Registry
Warehouses and lakehouses start to look like the natural substrate for agentic workflows. They centralize data across domains. They carry semantic layers that define metrics. They sit at the intersection of governance, lineage, and access control.
The warehouse plus metrics layer plus governance tooling starts to look less like a reporting system and more like a "truth registry."
But here's the missing piece: these stacks were designed for humans running queries, not agents orchestrating workflows. Humans can hold nuance in their heads. If finance and sales disagree on ARR, they talk it out.
Agents cannot. They need explicit rules. They need to know that "official_arr" is for external reporting, "sales_arr" is for comp plans, and "product_arr" is for feature analysis.
They need the warehouse to not only store the data but encode the precedence and meaning of that data.
This Is Where Converge Lives
We're not building another system of record. We're building the semantic governance layer that makes systems of record usable by agents.
Agents don't just need access to data. They need access to decision traces.
Rules tell an agent what should happen in general ("use official ARR for reporting"). Decision traces capture what happened in a specific case ("we used X definition, under policy v3.2, with a VP exception, and here's what we changed").
Existing systems of record don't capture this. They store final state, not the reasoning that led to it. They can't replay the context at decision time—which means they can't audit the decision, learn from it, or use it as precedent.
Converge fills this gap:
Converge Truths: business-level contracts that define "what must be true." These become the explicit rules agents follow.
Runtime enforcement: structural and semantic rules that agents cannot violate. When an agent proposes a change, we validate it against the contract before committing.
Decision traces: every decision, exception, override, and approval becomes a first-class record—structured, queryable evidence of how context turned into action.
Convergence to fixed points: agents propose, the engine validates and merges, repeat until stability. This is how we stop drift—not with better prompts, but with deterministic convergence semantics.
The UX Separates from the Truth
The UX of work is separating from the source of truth.
The UX can now be a chat window, a natural language interface, an agent UI that looks nothing like old enterprise applications. Under the hood, something still has to say "this is the canonical customer record" or "this number is the one we report to Wall Street."
CRM and ERP systems won't disappear. They'll evolve into state machines with APIs—optimized for programmatic access rather than human UI. The agent initiates the quote, computes pricing, assembles the contract, and writes the final state into the system of record through a well-defined boundary.
The system of record becomes less of a place you click around in and more of a durable storage and constraint engine that machines talk to.
Raising the Bar
Systems of record aren't dying. They're getting unbundled and rewired.
The "record" part—the actual truth—will live in warehouses, lakehouses, and operational systems. On top of that, a new layer of semantic contracts and control planes that tell agents how to safely read and write that truth.
The familiar SaaS front ends will matter less. Agents and workflow UIs will become the primary way humans interact with work. But the need for a well-defined source of truth—with clear ownership, constraints, and decision traces—will only grow.
Agents are not replacing systems of record. They're raising the standards for what a good one looks like.
Converge is built for this moment: the semantic governance layer that makes agents trustworthy, explainable, and governed. The companies that win will build amazing agentic experiences on top of boring, rock-solid sources of truth—rather than pretending those sources no longer matter.
Stop agent drift. Converge to an explainable result.