[!todo] Seed note. A starting point, not a finished note yet.
A system of record is the authoritative store for a class of business data: the CRM for customer relationships, the ERP for operations, the ledger for money. Its defensibility comes from unique data structures, long histories of activity, embedded access control, and regulatory logic that would be costly for a competitor to replicate. In the agent era this matters because an AI agent still needs somewhere authoritative to read state and write results, so owning the source of truth means charging for access to ground truth regardless of whether the consumer is a human or a bot. The live debate is whether the moat stays at the single system of record or relocates to whoever governs the cross-system layer where a decision spans several of them at once. Seeded from The Death of SaaS.