The Acumatica ERP Podcast Recap: Practical AI Strategies for Growing Businesses

Our focus in Season 2 of The Acumatica ERP Podcast is on how AI and modern ERP capabilities are reshaping businesses’ day-to-day operations. So, to start us off, Acumatica’s Doug Johnson, VP of Solution Architecture, and Omar Ghazi, Director of Product Management, Platform, AI, and Technology, joined me to discuss the AI and ERP features and capabilities growing businesses are using now, the innovations on the horizon, and what organizations need to know and consider as they incorporate AI into their operations.

Trust is such an important part of the discussion.  As Omar notes “A lot of customers are saying they want AI to do the work, not just answer questions. That’s a big shift we are seeing. At the same time, they want to be in control of what gets acted on their data. As a result, trust is a big gating factor in addition to the capability itself.”

Both Doug and Omar had a lot more to say about customers and their AI expectations, and here are just some of the insights they shared.

How Customers Are Using AI

With AI such an integral and growing part of Doug’s and Omar’s jobs, are they seeing customers looking to AI more and more as well?

Omar notes that the conversations have switched from should or can they use AI to how can AI save them time. But he’s also noticing a shift between small to medium-sized businesses.

Doug agrees, noting that the days of explaining AI to businesses are long over. “If I started a call talking about what AI is today, people would be like, ‘Okay, Doug, move it along. We got to get to the good stuff.’”

The “good stuff” is how the business is going to benefit from AI, including saving them money and reducing their time to deliver for their customers. Every business is different, with some recognizing that AI and ERP can work together, taking AI’s ability to manage unstructured data and combining it with what Doug calls ERP’s “algorithmic pristine data,” but he says it’s the people who use both the unstructured data and Acumatica’s structured data that will benefit the most.

“So, the people that are thinking of both structured and unstructured data are doing a lot better than the people that are just thinking of one or the other.”

How Customer and Partner Feedback is Helping Acumatica Taking AI ERP to the Next Level

The road to delivering an AI-powered cloud ERP solution  wasn’t all smooth, with immediate use of some AI-infused functionality such as Acumatica’s GL Anomaly Detection coming slower than expected. Doug says they asked Acumatica’s partners why.

“They said, ‘Well, we tried, but it was a little too confusing,’ and people didn’t understand how to use it within the ERP software. So, we pivoted, and we learned, and we said, ‘We need to come up with a couple things that guide our development processes.’ We call this our governance policy for innovation. It’s responsible, practical, and valuable.”

This includes ensuring that our customers’ data is theirs and not shared with AI. As Doug says, “Keeping your governance policy and your security policies in play is number one and first and foremost.”

As for making these AI features practical, Doug said “We’ve developed things that you can enable with three or four clicks and you’re off and running, so it makes it super easy. With our new anomaly detection, it’s literally three clicks to turn it on, and the system immediately starts predicting potential issues.”

Doug added that Acumatica is also ensuring that the features and capabilities we add provide value without a huge cost. “People are seeing the value in how structured and unstructured data can come together to really drive value for their business.”

According to Omar, that value comes from a commitment to keeping customer data private while embedding AI into processes customers are already using. One example is an AI-powered summary agent that helps users understand the recommended next steps and generates a suggested response for clients or customers based on the specific case at hand. “All of this would be AI-generated but based on real data and none of that is necessarily leaving the bounds of your Acumatica environment,” he says. “You’re able to build the trust with AI as you hand on more and more responsibilities to these AI agents.”

Omar goes on to highlight Acumatica’s automatic closure notes on cases that have been solved so that users can reference it later. Also helpful for users is its ability to draft customer-specific email responses while recognizing sentiment and patterns as well as summarizing across chaotic data.

“These high-volume, judgement-adjacent type work where it’s easy to check but hard to maybe sometimes start from scratch are some of the areas that are the clearest kind of step-one business value being delivered in ERP today.”

And Doug adds that for people just getting started with AI and concerned about putting confidential information out into the wild, “Our customers don’t have to worry about that. Everything is safeguarded.”

How Acumatica Is Going Even Further with AI ERP

The use cases for AI ERP are endless. Doug highlights the one area many people are most excited about — Acumatica’s AI Assistant.

For example, customers can ask for a list of products that are most profitable and of those, which ones are in stock. They can also ask to compare their financial outlook based on quarter one versus quarter two and receive not only numbers but an analysis of why and what.

This discussion of all that AI and ERP can do for businesses is coming at the perfect time. Acumatica launched its second release of the year — Acumatica 2026 R2 – on October 1, 2026. Omar explains that the release is focused on what customers and partners are finding a lot of value in, including AI automation, which Omar says, “empowers everybody,” while noting that Acumatica’s AI Assistant is becoming generally available in R2.

AI Assistant answers are based on customer data and provides sources, that more out-of-the-box generic inquiries will be incorporated so it will be armed with more knowledge for answering questions, and that the AI Assistant is more self-aware and context-aware. This means it can tell users what it does and what its boundaries are, and if a user is on a specific screen, it can easily summarize the information when asked.

“In addition, we brought help agents,” Omar says. “It will be able to draw upon your current version of Acumatica that you’re in and then look into our knowledge-based articles that are available on our community site and any sort of how-to document and be able to compile that…and then you can trace back to the source just like everything else that AI Assistant provides answers on.”

Acumatica’s AI Assistant can also provide a visual summary of a question, including a pie chart, bar chart, or KPI. But that’s not all Omar shared. He also shared that Acumatica is introducing a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that will work with generic inquiries.

“MCP allows an external AI solution, like Claude, ChatGPT, or any others that can support MCP to then connect to Acumatica. So, now you’re able to be outside of Acumatica and query questions about your data that resides in Acumatica, your system of truth.”

How to Find Out What Else Doug and Omar Had to Say

The AI ERP Podcast with Doug and Omar delivered insights every business looking to benefit from AI should hear. But it went even deeper, with Doug providing specific examples of how AI is reshaping expectations for ERP over time from a system of record to a system that surfaces insights, guides actions, and automates more work.

“Where ERP was very good at remembering things, presenting reports, following processes, doing if X then Y, ERP is now moving to a whole another capability, which is what’s going to happen? What do you have to look out for in the future? What should you be doing as opposed to what are you doing?” he says. “And it’s going to ground all those predictions, recommendations, and everything else in that pristine data.”

Doug and Omar also shared their thoughts on what growing businesses are misunderstanding about AI and ERP (e.g., AI just means chatbot bolted on top) and what they should be cautious about when adopting these tools (e.g., get moving sooner than later but make sure there are guardrails in place first). To find out what else they had to say, including Acumatica’s crawl, walk, run approach to AI functionality (that eventually leads to AI that can orchestrate), listen to the entire episode today.

I’ll leave you with one more insight from Doug on how Acumatica is uniquely positioned to deliver practical AI capabilities to its customers.

“We’re a platform company. We have a single code base, unlike a lot of other companies, with a universal security model, so that’s really going to help people in the long term utilize Acumatica to interface with these things,” he says. “The other thing that’s really important is the strength of our APIs and web services that we built from the ground up, because we were originally designed for partners to extend our core solution. So, all that’s going to work right into the hands of integrating with these new and exciting platforms that are powered by LLMs and artificial intelligence.”

If you find this episode useful, please subscribe to the show on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen so you can catch every new episode.