Features are easy. Coordination less so.

Software used to win by adding more features. Like a Swiss Army knife, the product with the most blades felt safest to buy.

That era is ending.

Here's why: most software optimises for what happens inside its own walls. But the work that actually matters in your business—closing deals, managing risk, fulfilling orders—doesn't occur inside one tool. It happens in the handoffs between them.

The next generation of winners in the agentic AI race won't succeed by adding "one more dashboard" or making you click faster.

They'll win by getting the structure right, coordinating work across tools and AI apps, so everything and everyone plays nicely together.

This is what we call coordination-rich software, it's the foundation of how we think about agentic organisation.

Biology figured this out long ago. Organisms didn't become dominant by hoarding organs like trophies. They thrived by coordinating cells, signalling reliably, allocating energy intelligently, and responding as unified systems.

Your business works the same way. Your tools are the cells. The competitive advantage lies in the coordination.

The ceiling of feature-rich software

Most software is designed around a single “department-shaped” world.

• A CRM is built to understand sales: leads, contacts, opportunities, stages, pipelines, forecasting.
• An accounting system understands finance: invoices, payments, ledgers, GST, reconciliations.
• An HR system understands people ops: roles, leave, performance, payroll rules.

That depth is valuable. The tool has a strong opinion about what matters in that domain and it gives you a structured way to run it.

This is useful. But it inevitably hits a ceiling, and here's the critical insight: modern work rarely stays inside one box.

Think about what actually creates value in your organisation. It's not the data sitting in your CRM.

It's what happens when a deal closes and that information needs to trigger provisioning in finance, contract storage in legal, and context delivery to support.

The value is created in the cascade, not in any single system.

The outcomes that matter are cross-tool. Close the deal, then billing, contracts and support all need to snap into place.

Stock runs low, triggering procurement, routing through approvals, and updating customers. A risk surfaces, prompting investigation, action, and the creation of an audit trail.

A deal closes, then someone has to chase invoicing, onboarding and “what was promised?” across three systems and five messages. That’s where momentum leaks: in the handoffs.

The rise of coordination-rich software

Coordination-rich software takes a fundamentally different approach. It treats your organisation like a living system, not a stack of disconnected applications.

Here's the logical progression: if value is created in the handoffs, then you need software that orchestrates those handoffs reliably. Not software that does more things.

It focuses on five critical capabilities:

Orchestration — Sequencing work across tools and teams with precision and purpose. This is where agentic operations begin: the system understands dependencies and executes multi-step workflows without human intervention.

Interoperability — Moving data and intent cleanly between systems without loss or distortion. Not just APIs, but semantic understanding of what the data means and what should happen next.

Policy — Enforcing rules and constraints as work happens, not after the fact. At Decidr, we call this governed autonomy: the system acts independently but within defined guardrails.

Recovery — Handling edge cases, exceptions, and failure states gracefully. When something breaks, the system doesn't just log an error. It contains the problem, notifies the right people, and provides options.

Accountability — Logging what happened and why, in language humans can understand. Every decision the system makes is explainable and auditable.

In other words, it's less about what the product can do in isolation and more about what it can connect to without creating chaos. This shift is what separates traditional automation from genuine agentic organisations.

Why coordination gives you the competitive edge

Features can be copied. A competitor can replicate your UI, match your feature set, even undercut your pricing.

Coordination is exponentially harder to replicate. Here's why:

It depends on real world context that can't be abstracted away—your systems, your edge cases, your approval chains, your organisational structure, your people and their work patterns.

It requires reliable infrastructure built on schemas, connectors, permissions, and audit trails. This infrastructure has to be built system by system, edge case by edge case.

It embeds operational knowledge that encodes how work actually flows in your organisation—where decisions live, when humans should step in, what constitutes an exception worth escalating.

The more your coordination layer learns about your specific context, the more valuable and difficult to replace it becomes. This is why coordination becomes the moat. It's not a feature you can copy. It's infrastructure that compounds over time.

Learning from living systems

In biology, you don't judge an organism by counting its parts. You judge it by the quality of its coordination:

Signalling — Cells communicate quickly and consistently across the system.

Homeostasis — The system self-corrects when conditions shift.

Specialisation — Different cells perform different functions with shared intent.

Immune response — The system detects anomalies and responds appropriately.

Now translate this to the software running your business:

Signalling becomes systems sharing context without manual intervention.

Homeostasis becomes workflows that detect drift and correct course—or escalate appropriately.

Specialisation becomes best-in-class tools working together rather than competing. Immune response becomes automated detection, triage, and containment of risk.

This is precisely why "one platform to replace everything" rarely succeeds. Healthy organisms don't replace their cells. They coordinate them.

What this means for buyers

If you're evaluating software in 2026, the question isn't "how many features does it have?"

That question optimises for the wrong thing. It assumes the problem is capability within a system, when the actual problem is coordination across systems.

The smarter questions are:

How well does it coordinate with what we already run? Can it take action, not just generate reports? Can it handle exceptions without breaking trust? Can it explain what it did and why? Can we govern it like a genuine part of the organisation?

These questions surface whether the software is designed for isolated tasks or integrated operations.

Feature-rich software sells to a team. Coordination-rich software compounds value across the entire business. The ROI isn't in the features. It's in the handoffs it eliminates, the delays it prevents, and the context it preserves.

What this means for builders

If you're building software, the product strategy shifts dramatically:

Stop competing on "more functionality in the UI." That's a race to the bottom. Every feature you add is a feature your competitor can add six months later.

Start competing on "less friction across the stack." This is defensible because it requires deep integration with context, infrastructure, and operational knowledge.

The practical implications:

Invest heavily in connectors, schemas, policies, logs, and recovery paths.

Treat interoperability as a first-class feature, not an item languishing in your integration backlog.

Design for exceptions and edge cases from day one, not as afterthoughts.

Build explainability and auditability into the core architecture.

The winners in the agentic era of software will feel less like standalone applications and more like connective tissue—invisible infrastructure that makes everything else work better.