You know the drill. Your typical workday begins where yesterday’s left off. A browser with 22 tabs of incomplete tasks, three open desktop apps, and a mountain of unread instant messages, emails, and alerts. You have three screens and a tablet on the side to help manage the madness. But you only have two eyes, one brain, and a finite amount of energy and patience.

Work was supposed to get easier with the advent of LLMs and AI. So why are we still drowning in tabs, screens, and dropdowns? Legacy application vendors want to keep your digital work-life cluttered because they already know what you’re starting to figure out. In the age of AI, you don’t need to live with their screens anymore. Because the real battle for the future of work isn’t about dashboards, it’s about who controls the data that drives them.

Gating data inside applications is the new power move

Conversational AI, agents, and autonomous workflows are increasingly replacing traditional point-and-click applications. In this new paradigm, the application layer becomes less relevant while the data layer becomes everything.

Major customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and other legacy application vendors understand this shift. Their traditional dominance means little if customers can bypass them entirely by asking an AI agent to “find all prospects in New York who haven’t been contacted in 30 days and draft personalized outreach emails.” That agent needs data from CRM, marketing automation, support tickets, financial systems, and more — unified and accessible in real time.

Large vendors know this, which is why many are updating their policies to restrict how enterprise data can be exported, shared, or used to train AI models. By limiting bulk access to data, they can keep enterprises reliant on vendor-controlled ecosystems rather than enabling real-time, enterprise-wide intelligence.

It’s a power move that ensures organizations remain tethered to applications, and the valuable data locked inside them.

Paying the enterprise toggle tax

There is a real cost associated with screen toggling, and it’s not cheap. The average knowledge worker toggles roughly 1,200 times a day, resulting in four lost hours of productivity a week, which is about five working weeks a year, according to a Harvard Business Review article. That’s equivalent to 10% of every working day spent toggling around your applications. Add that up across the enterprise, and that’s a significant and mostly hidden tax paid to application vendors for accessing your data inside their products.

But here’s the deal: You don’t need the dropdowns, the dashboards, hamburger menus, nav bars, and certainly not the 31 unread alerts. You only need a front-end LLM that is fed by an enterprise-wide, real-time intelligent data layer to draft a quarterly report, produce a slide, generate a spreadsheet, or write an email.

Legacy applications profit by keeping you tethered to your screens, tabs, and dashboards. They know their competitive moat isn’t the interface; it’s the data locked inside their systems. Now that LLMs and AI agents can bypass traditional front ends, the interface layer is losing relevance. That shift exposes where the true value lies: in the data itself. Which is why legacy vendors are doubling down, doing everything they can to keep that data bolted down inside their silos.

The path forward: open, trusted, and scalable

LLMs and AI agents are making traditional application interfaces increasingly irrelevant. You no longer need dashboards, menus, and endless tabs; one conversational front end can handle the same tasks faster and more intuitively. We’ve all seen the future of work, and we want it now, not in three years.

Organizations need a unified, trusted data layer to make that magical place a reality. This is the foundation that provides AI with context, ensures accuracy, and maintains ownership of data within the enterprise rather than locking it inside vendor silos.

The companies that win the AI race will be the ones with the strongest data foundation. That’s why control of the data layer isn’t just an IT choice — it’s control of the business itself.

Learn how to build that foundation in our white paper, The 10 Data Rules to Win in the Age of Intelligence.

This post was created by Reltio with Insider Studios.