Enterprise Apps Unpacked

The huge popularity of e-commerce added new complications to the already complicated process of reverse logistics, whereby products are sent back up the supply chain and returned to retailers, distributors and manufacturers. Besides adding shipping costs and environmental impacts, e-commerce returns are more susceptible to fraud and abuse.

As a result, companies are looking for ways to reduce their costs by minimizing returns and r...

Until recently, industrial AI has mostly been focused on predictive tools and analytics that run on workstations and mobile devices. Now agentic AI is shifting the focus to execution by giving industrial robots more autonomy and making some decisions without human intervention.

Yet people could be more essential than ever in making this new age of industrial AI a reality in asset-intensive industries like oil & gas, mining and ...

Human-centered leadership aims to put people first by prioritizing empathy, inclusiveness and employee development. While the approach has roots in the early 20th century, it is still just gaining a foothold in a world where top-down management remains dominant.

But now artificial intelligence is emerging as an effective tool for amplifying human-centered leadership. At the same time, human-centered approaches are proving to be the...

Can non-technical workers really use supposedly user-friendly low-code/no-code development tools to write and customize software, especially AI applications, for serious business use?

Indeed they can -- if they're operating under the auspices of a well-planned citizen developer program that sets realistic expectations, establishes clear guardrails, and provides the right programming tools and training. It's also important to have a...

Assessments are valuable hiring tools, but they can be challenging to design and implement. Recruiters and hiring managers use them to evaluate whether a candidate has the skills for a specific job, but also to identify cognitive capabilities and behavioral characteristics that are often better predictors of success.

Hiring assessments are mostly digitized and conducted over computers, but they tend to be reserved for high-volume r...

AI seems likely to transform more jobs than it eliminates, despite well-founded fears of job loss as companies increasingly adopt AI automation, lay off workers and move others into AI-centric roles.

That probably means the best response for workers is learning to use AI to their individual advantage, but in ways that align sufficiently with the goals of their organization, rather than resist AI entirely.

In this episode, we explor...

"Physical" AI – artificial intelligence embodied in devices like robots, drones and self-driving cars – could be nearing a tipping point, thanks to recent advancements in large language models and agentic AI. The convergence of physical and agentic AI is giving machines the ability to sense their environment, make decisions and take action.

Practical business applications are already emerging. They're a major focus of r...

Real-world deployments of agentic AI have so far been limited in scope, despite strong interest in using the technology to automate many of the business processes now handled by people.

One reason for the slow deployment of agents is the challenge of multi-agent orchestration: the ability of AI agents to communicate with each other and coordinate their activities across enterprise applications, workflows and even corporate firewall...

Direct materials sourcing is a critical process in product design, engineering and manufacturing. That was never more apparent in 2017 when Tesla began to ship the Model 3, its first electric vehicle meant to be affordable for middle-income buyers.

The company had set two ambitious and unprecedented goals: building an EV for a base price of $35,000 and completing the development cycle in three years, half the typical turnaround in ...

Agentic AI is the hottest trend in ERP. It promises to infuse enterprise applications with AI that anticipates users' needs, communicates with them in natural language and handles more of the tedium of working in ERP systems.

SAP is one of the leaders of the push for agentic AI. It has aggressively added special-purpose AI agents and development tools for building custom agents and beefed up its data platforms to accommodate AI's n...

Controversies over artificial general intelligence (AGI) mostly come down to two big issues: whether it's possible to make computers that are as smart as humans, and whether doing so is worth the risk of AGI somehow turning against its creators.

But what if AGI is not only feasible, but actually dependent on humans, and could ultimately be the ideal collaborator?

The head of an AI research lab asserts that a human-machine symbiosis...

Artificial intelligence is starting to transform buy-now, pay-later options and other types of embedded lending by taking over many of the steps of credit approval. It can speed up the information processing, analysis and decision-making of online lending, improve its accuracy and profitability, and ultimately make credit available to more consumers and businesses.

But AI lending also carries the risk of bias against minority group...

Fraud is among the most common abuses of information technology. Defined as intentional deception to gain an unfair advantage, fraud is increasingly common in talent management, especially recruiting, and has only gotten worse with the easy availability of AI.

For example, AI enables job applicants to misrepresent their qualifications by falsifying resumes and cover letters and tweaking them to match job descriptions. One study sho...

Dynamic pricing is an increasingly popular agentic AI application that showcases AI's advantages over humans in certain tasks. In seconds, AI can analyze customer histories and external data to optimize price quotes without turning off customers.

Such labor-intensive work can take salespeople minutes to complete, and they often have biases that cause them to miss opportunities. AI-driven dynamic pricing tools perform the analysis q...

While ERP cloud migration promises numerous benefits, including cost savings, leading-edge features, broad accessibility and ease of use, it also carries substantial risks. This is especially true of moving the accounting and financial management modules of on-premises ERP to the cloud.

A poorly executed move can break an organization's financial processes and expose sensitive data, raising significant financial and regulatory risk...

The affordable connected sensors made possible by the internet of things seem tailor-made for supply chain management. IoT sensors are ideal for collecting and transmitting the data that companies need for numerous supply chain processes, from traceability and procurement to inventory optimization and logistics.

But has IoT lived up to its initial growth spurt and hype of a decade ago? Recent indications are that it is beginning to...

The evidence that AI can eliminate jobs is piling up. Amazon said recently it would lay off 14,000 corporate workers in an effort to become more nimble. The cuts weren't directly tied to AI, but the CEO previously said the workforce would shrink as Amazon continues to embrace AI. Target and UPS announced similar layoffs.

Meanwhile, software vendors announced reductions that were explicitly caused by AI. For example, Salesforce cut ...

There's little doubt that AI is starting to eliminate jobs. Recent headlines confirm it. The trend presents a special risk to the manufacturing sector just as baby boomers retire in droves and more companies seek to build up their workforces and reverse the decades-long preference for cheap overseas labor.

But there are positive aspects to AI's impact on manufacturing jobs. Many workers are learning to use it to do their jobs more ...

ERP sustainability software mostly focuses on data collection and reporting requirements of environmental, safety and governance (ESG) policies and typically isn't intended to control the business processes that impact the physical environment.

But other digital technology has been used for years to monitor and optimize resource use. Now IoT sensors are increasingly paired w...