AI is changing the economics of software. IT needs a new playbook.
Why our acquisition of Torii is about much more than managing software spend
Today, Freshworks officially welcomes Torii to the team.
I've spent much of my career building enterprise software, but I started in finance. And one of the things that fascinates me about AI is how fundamentally it changes the economics of both software and the work that software performs.
For decades, enterprise software has largely been sold by the seat. Companies paid for applications, employees used them, and IT managed the infrastructure and services that kept everything running. AI is changing that model.
Increasingly, software doesn't just help people do work. It does the work. And as AI agents take on more responsibilities, the cost of that work becomes increasingly variable, driven by consumption, the models being used, and the complexity of the jobs being performed.
That's a significant change for CIOs and CFOs, and it creates an entirely new set of questions that traditional IT and financial management tools weren't designed to answer.
You can't manage what you can't see
AI is spreading throughout the enterprise, often faster than IT can keep up. Employees are adopting AI assistants, developers are building applications with tools like Cursor and Claude Code, and business units are experimenting with agents that can perform increasingly complex work.
I think that's exciting, and we should be encouraging innovation, not putting up barriers to it. But there's a problem. Who knows which AI tools are being used? Who has access to them? What are they costing? And perhaps most importantly, what value are they actually delivering?
These questions become much more important when AI moves beyond an employee productivity tool and begins performing work on behalf of the business. You can't manage a digital workforce with the same tools you used to manage software subscriptions.
And that's one of the reasons we're so excited about Torii.
Operational context is the foundation for AI
At Freshworks, our vision starts with a simple idea that AI should remove mundane work, not just make it easier for humans to manage.
That starts inside IT, where we believe digital workers can increasingly perform the jobs that have traditionally required tickets, queues, and manual intervention. But to do those jobs well, AI needs context.
It needs to understand the employee, the device, the application, the underlying infrastructure, and the policies that govern what actions are permitted. That's why we've been investing in expanding Freshservice beyond traditional IT service management.
You can't manage a digital workforce with the same tools you used to manage software subscriptions.
Our investments in IT asset management, including Device42, provide deeper visibility into hardware, infrastructure, and the relationships between them. Torii adds another critical dimension: discovery, usage, access, and economics across SaaS applications and AI tools.
Torii has built an impressive platform that helps organizations discover their software and AI footprint, understand usage, optimize licenses, automate workflows, and track AI consumption at a granular level.
Bringing these capabilities together over time is about much more than producing better reports, it's about building the operational context that enables AI to understand the environment it's working in, take the right actions, and operate within the right controls.
The CIO's opportunity is bigger than IT
I believe we're at the beginning of a much larger transformation. The first phase is helping IT transform its own operations. Remove mundane work, improve employee experiences, and give IT professionals more time to work on the things that matter.
The next phase is even more interesting, because as AI agents proliferate across every business function, someone will need to understand what those agents are doing, what systems they can access, whether they're performing as expected, and what they cost to operate.
I believe the Office of the CIO is uniquely positioned to take on that responsibility. Not by controlling every AI experiment or slowing innovation, but by giving the business a trusted foundation on which innovation can scale.
The CIO has an opportunity to move from managing the technology that supports work to managing the technology that performs work. And the economics of that work will matter just as much as its performance.
That's where I believe Freshservice is headed, and why Torii is such an important addition to our strategy.
What's next
To our new colleagues at Torii: Welcome to Freshworks. You've built an exceptional product and a company with deep expertise in a category that is becoming more important every day. I'm excited about what we can accomplish together.
For our customers and partners: The immediate priority is continuity. Existing products, support arrangements, and commitments remain in place. Our teams are now working together on integration plans, and we'll share more as that roadmap develops.
What excites me most isn't simply the addition of another set of capabilities to Freshservice. It's the opportunity to help define how enterprises will manage a world in which software doesn't just support work, but increasingly performs it.
And I believe IT has an extraordinary opportunity to lead that change.
