Time devours business value.
The longer it takes your organization to respond to a business event, the less value you can extract from it. This is a fundamental truth that will separate tomorrow's market leaders from the also-rans.
I've been tracking this phenomenon across industries, and the pattern is unmistakable: companies that can rapidly process, analyze, and act on business events gain a decisive edge. But what if we could reduce that response time to zero?
The Trust Gap Holding Businesses Back
Before we can achieve zero-latency decision-making, we must address the elephant in the room: data quality.
Most organizations are drowning in data but starving for insights they can trust. According to a 2025 Data Integrity study, data quality is the top challenge impacting data integrity for 64% of organizations. This directly undermines other initiatives meant to improve data integrity.
The consequences are severe. When business leaders don't trust their data, they fall back on gut instinct or delay decisions entirely. Both approaches surrender competitive advantage in a market that rewards speed and precision.
The solution isn't more data. It's better data architecture.
Business Data Fabric: The Foundation for Zero Latency
A business data fabric fundamentally changes how organizations interact with their information assets. By creating an integrated, semantically-rich layer over fragmented data landscapes, it dramatically reduces the time between event and action.
The impact is quantifiable. Gartner reports that data fabric deployments quadruple the efficiency of data utilization while halving human-driven data management tasks.
This isn't just about efficiency. It's about enabling an entirely new approach to business decision-making.
Agentic AI: The Autonomous Workforce
When high-quality data meets advanced AI capabilities, we cross a threshold into truly autonomous decision-making.
Agentic AI represents a fundamental shift in how businesses operate. Unlike traditional automation that follows rigid rules, agentic systems can independently plan and execute actions to achieve business goals.
The implications are profound. Gartner predicts that by 2028, at least 15 percent of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through Agentic AI.
But there's a critical requirement: these systems need high-quality, contextually rich data to function effectively.
SAP Business Data Cloud: Bridging the Trust Gap
This is where solutions like SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) become transformative. By harmonizing data across the enterprise and providing a trusted foundation for AI systems, they enable the zero-latency business.
The partnership between SAP and Databricks represents a significant advancement in this space. By combining SAP's business data expertise with Databricks' AI capabilities, organizations can run end-to-end AI and analytics directly within SAP BDC.
The result? A dramatic reduction in the time between business event and value-creating action.
The Competitive Edge of Zero Response Time
Organizations that achieve zero latency gain multiple advantages:
First, they capture opportunities that others miss entirely. When your systems can autonomously identify and act on market signals in real-time, you operate in a different competitive dimension.
Second, they optimize resource allocation continuously rather than periodically. This means capital, inventory, and human resources flow to their highest-value use without manual intervention.
Third, they create feedback loops that accelerate learning and adaptation. Each autonomous decision generates data that improves future decisions, creating a virtuous cycle of improvement.
The Path Forward
The journey to zero response time requires three parallel investments:
1. Data architecture that bridges the trust gap and provides a semantically rich foundation for AI systems
2. Agentic AI capabilities that can autonomously plan and execute actions based on business events
3. Organizational readiness to embrace a new division of labor between human and artificial intelligence
Organizations that move decisively on all three fronts will establish competitive advantages that others cannot easily match.
The Future Is Already Here
We're entering an era where the gap between business event and value-creating response approaches zero. This isn't science fiction. It's happening now in organizations that have made the necessary investments in data architecture and AI capabilities.
The question isn't whether your organization will make this transition, but when and how effectively you'll execute it.
Those who move first and execute well will redefine competitive advantage in their industries. Those who wait will find themselves responding to a market that's already moved on.
Time devours business value. But with the right approach to data and AI, you can bend time to your advantage.
