As Crawl is to Walk, ERP is to AI

In the world according to "AI enablement," I'd like to take a gigantic step back to highlight AI's older, far underrated sibling... ERP systems.

One of the things I've noticed over the last several years is that organizations seem to be treating AI as the next major technology initiative, but I suspect it's actually exposing something much more fundamental.

For decades, companies have accepted that bits and pieces of the business live everywhere. Some information is in the ERP. Some is in Excel. Some is in Access. Some is in SharePoint. Some lives in a homegrown application that only one person knows how to maintain. And, of course, there's always that spreadsheet that somehow became mission-critical... the one that's so large it turns any hard drive older than five years into a burn hazard.

It worked because people filled in the gaps. We knew where to go for answers. We knew which reports to trust, which ones to ignore, and who to call when two systems disagreed with each other.

AI doesn't have that luxury. It can only work with the information we give it. If we've spent the last twenty years teaching our organizations that the ERP is one source of truth instead of the source of truth, we shouldn't be surprised when AI struggles to connect the dots.

I think ERP systems are about to have their moment... again.

Not because ERPs suddenly became ~sExIeR*~*, but because they were designed to solve a problem we're finally starting to appreciate again: getting the business to operate from a common set of information.

If your organization is asking how to become "AI-enabled," my instinct wouldn't be to start shopping for another AI tool.

I'd start by asking a much less glamorous question:

"How much of our business actually runs through our ERP?"

Because I think that's going to become one of the strongest predictors of which organizations get real value from AI.