Enterprise AI Platforms: What You Need to Know and Where to Start | Publicis Sapient

An Enterprise AI Platform Is the Difference Between Innovation and Expensive Chaos

What you need to know about foundational AI platforms, and where to start

Artificial intelligence (AI) projects seem manageable at first glance. A model that automates a process here, a chatbot that improves customer interactions there. But as companies scale, the cracks start to show. Many organizations will spend the next few years patching together AI tools in an effort to cut costs, drive growth or outpace the competition. The smart ones are taking a different approach. Instead of managing AI on a project-by-project basis, they’re investing in enterprise AI platforms—systems designed to integrate, automate and scale AI across the organization. An enterprise AI platform is like a hyperscaler for every AI tool you’ll ever create. It’s the most important investment, but often gets less spotlight than it deserves.

Executive summary:

Platforms like Microsoft Copilot and Salesforce Einstein offer strong capabilities for specific functions, and many enterprises successfully leverage them as building blocks. However, organizations often layer on complementary integrations and custom data contextualization to enable truly cross-functional, agentic workflows that serve their highest-value use cases.
While choosing a single AI provider can speed initial deployment, organizations often realize greater agility and resilience by maintaining flexibility to integrate multiple models and data environments as their needs evolve. Consider how a more open infrastructure might support your long-term AI roadmap.
Without an enterprise AI platform, your employees will default to public AI tools, increasing security risks. Your AI tools won’t be able to evolve into automated, agentic workflows. The initial investment you made in AI will depreciate.

Think of it this way: Instead of starting from scratch with every AI tool you build (knowing that eventually, you will need a lot of them), why not set up an enterprise AI platform with the end goal in mind? Build it right from the start, so that rolling out AI capabilities becomes easier—and your AI becomes so valuable that you can’t live without it.

This article will explain everything you need to know about enterprise AI platforms: how we define them, how and why you should invest in them, potential challenges you’ll face, where to start and what a good one actually looks like—regardless of your current AI investments, maturity and infrastructure.

What exactly is an enterprise AI platform?
What is NOT an enterprise AI platform?
Why invest now? (Your employees might force your hand)
The top challenges we see in enterprise AI adoption
Where to start (and how to start) building
The skeleton of the enterprise AI platform
The enterprise AI platform architecture
Three things that will determine your platform’s longevity
Tools get the hype, but infrastructure wins the future

So, what exactly is an enterprise AI platform?

In technical terms, an enterprise AI platform is a comprehensive software system that allows AI tools to realize their full potential across the company. It manages data, automates machine learning (ML) and DevOps and ensures security, so AI tools actually do what they promise instead of causing expensive chaos. Without this platform foundation, many businesses end up with costly, isolated AI tools that quickly become outdated in comparison to the latest public AI applications.

The reason we need them: AI tools like chatbots, coding assistants and generative AI news summarizers will fall apart in the enterprise environment without a foundation. It’s like having the fastest EV car without the proper charging infrastructure, suitable roads and proper safety precautions. Sure, you can drive the car, but it can’t always get you where you need to go.

What is NOT an enterprise AI platform?

Right now, some companies are rolling out products and marketing them as “AI platforms.” Many are missing the difference between a comprehensive enterprise AI platform, an AI tool and products that have elements of AI in them. Here are three things commonly thought of as comprehensive platforms, and why they might not be getting the job done:

AI chatbots and copilots ≠ Platform
Take ChatGPT Pro or Microsoft Copilot—they’re impressive, but they:
- Lack enterprise integration—They don’t natively connect with ERP systems, proprietary databases or business logic workflows
- Have no context memory—They can generate insights on demand but can’t retain institutional or contextual knowledge over time to make AI-driven decisions more effective
- Aren’t built with security and compliance in mind—They process data through external servers, creating serious risks for enterprises dealing with GDPR, HIPAA or SOC 2 compliance
An enterprise AI platform, in contrast, runs within a company’s infrastructure—whether on-prem, private cloud or hybrid environments—and enforces strict access controls, encryption and auditability.
SaaS AI add-ons ≠ Platform
Most hyperscale and SaaS-embedded AI tools shine in their domains—Salesforce Einstein powers CRM workflows, Microsoft’s Copilot surfaces insights in Office, and ServiceNow AI accelerates ticket resolution. But organizations often discover three common gaps when they try to build a truly company-wide AI strategy:
- Ecosystem lock-in. Many tools work beautifully within their own suites, yet can require custom connectors or manual exports to sync with your financial models, proprietary ML services or bespoke applications.
- Siloed orchestration. Function-specific AI (think ticket summarization or sales forecasting) delivers point value, but coordinating models across sales, operations, engineering and compliance—where exponential value often lives—usually demands an extra layer of workflow management.
- Preset customization. SaaS AI comes with best-practice capabilities out of the box, yet enterprises that want to train, fine-tune and deploy specialized models will eventually outgrow the default settings.
A true enterprise AI platform acts as an orchestration layer, integrating with multiple SaaS tools, internal databases and AI models to create a companywide AI strategy.
Generic infrastructure providers ≠ Platform
Major cloud and infrastructure providers supply many of the key components for an enterprise AI platform. However, businesses and developers must still build an orchestration layer to seamlessly integrate these tools, enabling them to develop, train and deploy custom machine learning models while automating parts of the ML training process—without requiring deep AI expertise or coding skills.
Generic infrastructure providers are missing:
- Integration with legacy systems—Enterprise AI needs to work with SAP, Oracle and many other large internal tools
- Data residency—Putting all of your data on the cloud might pose a security risk, even for analytical purposes
- Definitions of best practices —AI programs begin with a series of experiments to validate a hypothesis, and it takes additional effort to enable best practices for experiment tracking, explainability, collaboration, etc. which will be unique to your business and crucial for scaling automation
In contrast to a generic infrastructure provider, an enterprise AI platform can integrate with your legacy technology stack, new composable commerce platform and payments platform. It also centralizes your data and best practices in one repository, making it a foundation for continuous AI-driven operations rather than a single-use automation tool.

Why invest in enterprise AI now?

We’re still in the early stages of AI, especially agentic AI. It may seem like it’s prudent to wait a few years before investing in an enterprise platform. However, your competitive edge in AI—and in your industry—revolves around two things: 1) Your proprietary data and 2) Your speed to market

If you don’t lay the AI/ML foundation for your own data and AI capabilities, your employees are going to continue using public tools or building clunky one-off solutions. Why? Because they’re often cheap or free, they’re fast and you haven’t given them another option. They’re most likely pasting company info into ChatGPT, experimenting with AI-powered automation and sending sensitive business documents through tools that you don’t control—with no real long-term plan in mind.

If too many employees or business units are rolling out their own solutions, you speed-to-market will suffer because these ad hoc solutions won’t stand the test of time.

The top challenges we see in enterprise AI adoption

Creating an enterprise AI platform is not an easy solution. Many organizations are interested in building an enterprise AI platform and immediately face some significant obstacles. These are the biggest obstacles we see when it comes to implementing an enterprise AI platform:

You’re lacking organized data
AI needs clean, structured and unified data, and most enterprises don’t have that. Data is stuck in silos, riddled with inconsistencies and locked away in legacy systems.
What you need to do: Start small. Map your data sources, establish governance rules and get a handle on what data is actually usable.
Security and compliance are an afterthought
Enterprise AI will most likely touch sensitive data, which means security and compliance aren’t optional.
What you need to do: Build AI governance before widespread adoption—encryption, role-based access, audit logs and compliance tracking need to be built in from day one.
Your legacy systems hold you back
You can’t just rip and replace your entire existing IT stack, so your enterprise AI has to work with what you already have.
What you need to do: Focus on hybrid integration—use APIs and middleware to bridge old systems with new AI capabilities.
Your team doesn’t trust AI solutions
If AI is an unexplainable black box, your employees won’t use it—and your leadership team won’t trust it.
What you need to do: Prioritize AI explainability and transparency. Deploy models that show their work, provide audit trails and require human oversight
AI costs unexpectedly build up
AI costs could spiral out of control without planning. A good enterprise AI platform allows you to dynamically manage costs by using the most optimal services for the task at hand. We have compared AI solutions with identical capabilities where one is one-tenth the cost of the other, due to a strategic approach to LLM size and usage.
What you need to do: Use FinOps methodologies to track spending and optimize AI workloads—otherwise, you’ll burn your budget before seeing real ROI.

If enterprise AI seems unrealistic, here’s where to start

For companies that feel like they’re late to AI: it is never too late. The beauty of this technology and this early-stage time period is that there’s still an opportunity to define your future with AI business transformation. Whether you’re ready to invest in a full enterprise AI platform or not, these are the lower-cost enterprise AI projects you can tackle right now to prepare for AI transformation.

Find a low-risk, high-value AI use case—Look for AI applications that won’t break your systems but will show immediate impact:
- AI-powered knowledge assistants to speed up internal research
- AI-generated reports and data summaries for operations teams
- AI-assisted code suggestions to enhance developer productivity
Read the AI risk management playbook to learn how to scale from MVP to working product
Set AI usage guidelines—Employees are already using AI tools, so put realistic policies in place now to prevent data risks.
Get your data in order—Even if you’re not ready for enterprise AI today, modernizing your data infrastructure will put you in a much better position for AI adoption.
Train your workforce on AI—AI is only useful if people know how to use it. Work with your employees to create tools and processes that are customized to their workflows, not the other way around.

After you’ve tackled these projects and are ready to build out your enterprise AI platform, it’s important to know what makes an AI platform succeed.

The skeleton of an enterprise AI platform

These are the bones of a good enterprise AI platform:

Data processing and integration—AI is useless without data. So, your platform should pull structured and unstructured data from ERP, CRM, cloud storage and beyond.
AI model hub—Since one model is probably not a long-term solution, multiple AI models tailored for different jobs, whether they are large language models (LLMs), domain-specific AI or custom-built neural networks, should have a place in your platform.
Enterprise-wide context store—Your platform should actually remember company policy, historical projects, internal best practices, content guidelines and any tribal knowledge you can document.
Security and compliance layer—If it’s not GDPR-, HIPAA- or SOC 2-compliant, it’s a liability, not a platform.
AI automation and decision-making—Beyond basic automation, real enterprise AI needs to think and adapt in real-time through deterministic rules and testing that help AI agents make smart decisions.
Human-AI collaboration tools—Chat interfaces, workflow automation and AI-powered coding assistance that connect to true employee needs and pain points, vs. which tools look good on paper.

Enterprise AI platform architecture

Bodhi, Publicis Sapient’s enterprise agentic AI platform, operates as a three-tiered system, each layer designed to handle distinct AI-related functions. The first layer of the architecture encompasses all of the key features listed above, opening the door for two more layers of pre-built capabilities, business solutions and custom AI workflows.

Layer 1 The foundational platform

Data ingestion and processing—Aggregates structured and unstructured data from ERP systems, CRMs, internal databases and third-party APIs
Data shaping and transformation—Normalizes and prepares data for machine learning workflows
AI model hosting—Provides the computational infrastructure to host multiple AI models, whether they are proprietary, open-source or third-party LLMs
Security and compliance framework—Ensures that all data interactions meet regulatory standards like GDPR, HIPAA and SOC 2

Layer 2 Modular AI capabilities

Bodhi’s second layer houses pre-built AI capabilities that can be activated based on specific needs. Each of these pre-built AI capabilities were created in record time due the foundational platform. This layer can quickly aggregate and normalize data from a variety of internal systems, host multiple new LLMs and quickly check for security and compliance. These capabilities include:

Enterprise Search—A conversational AI interface designed for enterprise knowledge management and intelligent search
Bodhi Insights—A natural language analytics engine that generates insights from structured and unstructured dataset
Bodhi Curate—An automated data quality assurance, compliance and management tool to build reliable data pipelines
Bodhi Optimize—An process automation tool that can solve complex problems with advanced algorithms and AI
Bodhi Compliance—AI-powered compliance checks to validate content, images and documents against industry regulations
Bodhi Personalize—A personalization tool that tailors customer experiences with real-time, context-aware product suggestions
Bodhi Detect—A real-time anomaly detection engine for monitoring fraud, cybersecurity threats and operational failure
Bodhi Forecast—Predictive analytics for supply chain optimization, revenue forecasting and risk modeling
Bodhi Vision—An AI-powered image and video analysis tool for industries such as retail, manufacturing and healthcare

Each of these capabilities can function as a standalone AI tool or be combined to create a more complex solution tailored to enterprise needs.

Layer 3 Business solutions and custom AI workflows

The final layer of Bodhi is its solution-building capability. This layer allows businesses to build custom agentic AI workflows that integrate multiple pre-built AI capabilities. Instead of adopting a one-size-fits-all AI workflow, enterprises can:

Deploy AI agents for specific workflows (e.g., AI-powered legacy software application modernization, financial risk modeling or automated legal document review)
Customize AI behaviors by defining business-specific rules and optimizations (e.g., implementing agile software development practices)
Integrate AI seamlessly with enterprise applications like SAP, ServiceNow, Salesforce, JIRA and Confluence

Here are just a few of the ready-to-use solutions that we’ve built using the solution-building capability thus far:

Product recommendation systems
GenAI content suite (with generative AI for marketing, AI lineage and compliance)
Data-converse (let your users talk to their data)
Sapient Slingshot (An AI software development platform that automates the workflow of the software development lifecycle)

Learn how our engineers built Sapient Slingshot, our AI software development platform, on the Bodhi infrastructure.

How to make sure your enterprise AI platform will actually last

Building an enterprise AI platform is a bit like “building the plane as you fly it”—a cliché, sure, but fitting. As technology evolves by the minute, there’s no such thing as a fixed, one-and-done enterprise AI platform. Whether you build it yourself, hire a third-party to help or even invest in third-party software, these are the key elements you should prioritize to make sure your platform is scalable:

Cloud-agnostic and multi-LLM capabilities
Many organizations start with a preferred cloud provider or model to move quickly—AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, for example. Over time, consider designing portability into your platform so you can maintain flexibility and optimize cost and performance as your AI landscape evolves. Additionally, make sure your platform can use multiple large language and visual models (LLMs, VLMs) in parallel. You might prefer OpenAI’s GPT-5 for customer support but want a specialized locally-hosted financial model for risk assessment, and your platform should integrate with both seamlessly.
Enterprise security and compliance
Two of the biggest burdens of even singular AI tools in an enterprise setting are security and compliance—especially in industries dealing with personally identifiable information (PII). While we talk about the importance of compliance when it comes to data, we often don’t define what compliance means tactically. A sturdy enterprise AI platform should have compliance-by-design. This means:
- On-prem deployment—Businesses that need complete data control can host their enterprise AI platform within their own infrastructure
- Role-based access control (RBAC)—This restricts AI-generated outputs based on individualized user permissions
- AI transparency and explainability —Comprehensive documentation through the building, testing and production of your platform that can ensure that regulatory bodies (or anyone, really) can audit your AI’s decisions and track logic and actions within workflows (You may also be able to automate this documentation using AI.)
Context-aware AI
Why invest in an enterprise AI platform if it’s not going to be unique to your business? Using third-party AI tools is almost like hiring and training a brand-new employee every single day. Unlike ChatGPT, which has the limited memory of your last few chat conversations, your enterprise AI platform should remember all interactions, all enterprise workflows and all documentation so that it can generate domain-specific insights. There are a variety of approaches to creating this context awareness, from real-time data streams to knowledge graphs to edge AI, that will make your platform much more useful for your employees, which is hugely important for long-term value.
Here are some examples of why context-aware AI is important:
- In financial services, your enterprise AI should know regulatory reporting requirements and be able to generate compliance-ready financial models
- In software development, your platform should integrate with enterprise codebases and be able to write, review and debug code with full awareness of company-specific libraries and development practices

Tools get the hype, but platforms win the future

Everyone, including those of us in the consulting industry, wants the magic of AI, but no one wants to talk about the invisible platforms that will make it real. AI tools don’t run in a vacuum; they require an actual system, an enterprise backbone that can ingest data, fine-tune models, enforce security policies and orchestrate decision-making at scale. This is the paradox of enterprise AI today: Companies chase the latest applications while neglecting the architecture and systems integration that will help them thrivein the long run. It’s like trying to build the next great software product without an OS, without cloud storage, without an API strategy—just raw applications with nowhere to live.

The real investment, the one no one is paying enough attention to, is the AI/ML platform itself—the Bodhis of the world, the unseen but essential layers that allow AI to function reliably, securely and at enterprise scale. Leaders who understand this are playing the long game. They’re not just deploying the newest AI tool. They’re building the infrastructure that will let their company adapt to whatever comes next, seamlessly and on their own terms. Because in the end, your infrastructure will not end up in a press release or an earnings report, but it will be the hidden reason you’re the next market leader. Build the foundation to make AI work for you, instead of racing to keep up with everyone else.