Enterprise Apps Unpacked

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...

The internet transformed corporate learning from a paper-based, in-person process to one that is largely delivered in digital form, on demand from nearly any device or location.

More recently, generative AI has provided learning and development (L&D) teams with a tireless assistant that can crank out educational content in minutes. Now AI-powered search is sparking another transformation as employees increasingly use it to find...

Generative and agentic AI are rapidly infiltrating enterprise software. But both are prone to data management issues that can hobble their effectiveness and lead to AI hallucinations and faulty decision-making that carry significant risks for businesses.

In this episode, we examine an innovative approach that aims to solve these data problems by basing AI models on standard, industry-specific business processes and compliance guard...

Procurement has become a strategic priority with significant impact on the bottom line. It's a data-intensive process that requires communicating with large numbers of suppliers, products and services – the kind of complex, transaction-heavy workflow that is uniquely suited to being automated with generative and agentic AI.

In this episode, we examine how AI can make procurement more effective and efficient, where it fits in the pr...

AI's growing ability to take over human tasks has many people worried about losing their jobs. Some companies are addressing these concerns by educating employees on how to instead use AI as a helper that frees them for more creative work and adds value.

In this episode, we explore ways to encourage AI use without mandating it, the kinds of training that work best and how to develop a curriculum that covers different experience lev...

Digital twins – virtual representations of real-world things – are a hot topic, and they're becoming more capable with the addition of AI and geospatial awareness. In this episode, we explain how AI-enhanced spatial digital twins work, how they're being used today, what it takes to deploy them, and their potential uses.

Featuring: Eric Liu, founder and CEO of TwinMatrix Technologies

In today’s episode, we'll also cover:

• How sp...

What separates successful enterprise technology implementations from costly failures? Here on Enterprise Apps Unpacked, we’ll do a deep dive into strategies that actually deliver results. Every other Monday, veteran IT journalist David Essex interviews corporate leaders, industry experts and vendors—the people who are truly in the know—about important developments in ERP, HR and supply chain systems and the other applications that ...

SAP has faced numerous challenges in recent years, but three big ones stand out: moving its on-premises products to the cloud; convincing customers to adopt its current ERP platform, S/4HANA Cloud; and meeting the unprecedented demand for artificial intelligence by developing practical AI applications.

SAP touted significant progress on all three fronts at its annual Sapphire conference, which was held on consecutive weeks this mon...