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Ramp just launched their integration with Microsoft Copilot - an early sign of a huge earthquake that's about to shake up the entire tech industry. Microsoft believes that Copilots are the new Operating System. And they might damn well be right [1]! While every SaaS app on the planet rushed to add Copilots within their application in 2023, MS realized that valuable work is created at the interface between systems, and rarely within just one system alone. That's why they're making it super easy for anyone to integrate their app within their Copilot ecosystem & are piggybacking on their existing Teams Apps to bring a huge swath of third-party integrations right into their Copilot. Instead of hopping between platforms and interfacing with a bunch of disconnected Copilots - who each don't fully understand what the user is trying to accomplish - Microsoft is aiming to provide a single, unified Copilot interface from where users can (eventually) do most of their work. Sounds great, right? Not if you're not Microsoft. While the ecosystem is 'open' in one direction (allowing everyone to build apps integrating into their Copilot), it's closed in the other: Only Microsoft is providing the actual Copilot interface itself that users will interact with, and they're tapping into *all* of their products to get that interface in front of users. In other words, Microsoft is very deliberately and intelligently maneuvering themselves into the value chain of every Software application in the world. Whether you're a huge platform like SAP or a "small" shop like Ramp, Microsoft wants to get between you and your users - their biggest power-play yet since the Browser Wars of the 90s [2]. Meanwhile, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce etc are all busy competing among themselves by claiming to have invented AI and launching cheap ChatGPT wrappers as The Next Big Thing™ to embed themselves even deeper within their customers while completely missing the point. While two dogs are fighting for a bone, a third one runs away with it. Microsoft eclipses the distribution power of any other singular vendor and by a large margin. The only way to prevent them from accumulating this much power and causing significant economic damage to the software industry is to create a Copilot ecosystem that is truly open. An ecosystem where every software can interact with and integrate with any other software, where everyone can develop Copilots that accompany users across all their tools, and where all sides of the ecosystem are open - like the internet. [1] https://lnkd.in/eB2d7JBw [2] https://lnkd.in/eWSJTY9U