Right to Win
We’ve been answering a lot of questions lately about semantic technology, agentic access and where companies have a right to win and how best to place their data in GenAI workflows, agentics, and licensing arrangements. In the voice of one client recently:
I hadn’t thought about the API aspect of it all, rather I had a myopic view of everything embedded in the data model that customers consume en masse and use to populate a monolith dataset within their own ecosystems. I can see how you could just license an API into your semantic layer that helps to inform a customer’s internal LLM tools but doesn’t give up the secret sauce and IP value that goes into creating and maintaining it. Huge thanks for this insight.
The client’s question was more or less: how workflow and data vendors are handling the semantic layer in the context of agentics — specifically whether firms are embedding it into customer environments or keeping it in their own.
Good question, and we’re tracking closely under the leadership of Grant Hunter, our SVP of Outsell Intelligence and his team. His response:
The short answer is: vendors are keeping the semantic layer in their own environment. What looks like embedding is integration, not licensing — and the distinction matters.
What we’re seeing across workflow and data firms — CAS and comparable players — is that the semantic layer (ontologies, entity resolution, taxonomies, knowledge graphs) stays on the vendor’s system. Clients connect to it through APIs, MCPs, or workflow-embedded apps. The experience can feel deeply embedded in client workflows, but the layer itself never left the vendor’s environment.
The test is simple: where does the data live? If the vendor sends the semantic layer into the client’s environment for the client to deploy on their own data, that’s a licensing decision — the vendor has surrendered architectural control.
What most vendors are doing instead is integration: the layer stays with them, the client workflow connects to it live, and the vendor retains control of the feed, versioning, and the moat. Any vendor actually sending the layer into client environments is the exception and typically confined to custom enterprise arrangements.
This maps directly to the Outsell Right-to-Win Matrix controlling the data layer the workflow depends on — so that removing your data breaks the decision — is integration. A licensed data feed ingested into an enterprise system is not. Most vendors are closer to the latter than they want to admit.
Grant actually addressed this topic in a LinkedIn post this week.
My take — don’t miss the matrix or Grant’s post! And call us. We are happy to go deeper in a conversation with you through inquiry privilege — access to our SMEs for top-of-mind confidential decision support. Smart answers for the hard questions.