Season 1 Highlights: AI, ERP, and Practical Insights for Growing Businesses

[00:00:00] John Case: We're just getting started. And I think there are very few places in the industry where you could say that kind of thing.

[00:00:15] Patryk Kubiszyn: If you're not growing yourself, you're shrinking.

[00:00:18] Mickey North Rizza: When we looked at it in 2025, it more than doubled to 52%. When we asked them why, they said they need to scale faster, and they see AI as the opportunity to scale faster.

[00:00:28] Andy Williamson: We ended up winning the race after 24 hours by 1.7 seconds. That was the difference between standing on the top step and, uh, taking second place.

[00:00:36] Ralph Torres: If you have someone who's dedicated and willing to learn the product and learn the software, then you can do a lot of things on your own.

[00:00:42] Jon Reed: If you put AI on top of bad data and bad processes, you are going to get a bad result.

[00:00:47] Chad Martin: AI is moving from a feature to a platform shift, and ERP is one of the categories where it has real near-term impact.

[00:00:56] Jon Pollock: AI should augment the human expertise and not replace it.

[00:01:10] David De Rego: Welcome to the Acumatica ERP podcast, where we explore practical innovation for growing businesses. I'm your host, David De Rego, and today we're doing something a little different. We're going to dive into some of the highlights from our incredible first season and share with you some great insights based on conversations with our customers, analysts, partners, and technology leaders who are helping shape the future of ERP and business innovation.

Over the past nine months, we explored how growing businesses are modernizing their operations, adopting AI capabilities into their workflows, and leveraging innovative ERP technologies to help them grow, scale, and succeed. We heard stories about transformation, efficiency, customer success, and the power of community.

Today, we're revisiting some of the moments that defined season one of our podcast and looking ahead to what's coming next. We launched our first season of the Acumatica ERP podcast with a focus on where Acumatica and the ERP industry are heading. In our very first episode, Acumatica CEO John Case laid out what he calls the secret sauce behind the company's growth.

It came down to three things: a product people genuinely love, a channel that extends the company's reach, and a community of partners, customers, and creators that are committed to redefining business management software for everyone. Here's John.

[00:02:30] John Case: I think that that formula sounds very simple. It sounds like, why doesn't everybody do that?

Et cetera, et cetera. Well, there's lots of reasons that not everybody does that. You know, one big reason is it's very hard to produce a product that resonates with that much of the market, and it's one that we have-- We only have one product. We have one, effectively one code stack, one set of, you know, tools we write, you name it.

We're not releasing nine different things. We release Acumatica twice a year, right? And to, to do that in a way that speaks to all of our users across industry, whether it's a financial person or a person in manufacturing or whatever it is, is incredibly difficult. Strong kudos to the team that has built that over many years.

So the only thing I'd say is then how do you think about your market plan? We know we're still a small company. We can't reach tens of thousands of customers alone. We needed expertise. We needed presence and, and specialization in these industries. Very, very clearly the way for us to do that was the channel.

And, you know, our channel for us has been the lifeblood of the company. It's been the way we grew the company from zero to where we are now. That will never change as long as I'm, you know, here at the company. And the community part, every company wants that. Every company wants to have a community that is basically fighting for them, fighting with them.

We are the small minority of that community. I did a, a community keynote last week. It showed that Acumatic employees were two percent of the people participating in that community. I love that, right? Because what it means is the people that are really engaged, the ones that are driving content and awareness and word of mouth and, you know, use cases and examples and sample code, it's way beyond anything we could accomplish ourselves, and that is a formula for success.

When customers want to work with us and they want to build on our platform and they want to share that with other users, there's no competitive zone there. It's, it's about everybody contributes and makes the community better, and I think that formula is incredibly hard to replicate. That is a great way for us to say that that is a magic secret sauce.

[00:04:29] David De Rego: A product that works, a channel that scales, and a community that no competitor can match. That message of unity set the tone for everything that followed this season, and it turns out that foundation is exactly what caught the attention of one of the most respected software investors in the world. In episode ten, we sat down with Chad Martin, Operating Managing Director at Vista Equity Partners, the firm that acquired Acumatica in twenty twenty-five.

Chad gave us an inside look at what Vista saw in Acumatica, why the timing is so compelling, and why AI has become core to Vista's portfolio of companies. Take a listen

[00:05:07] Chad Martin: What drew us to Acumatica was the combination of a genuinely differentiated product and a business model with strong unit economics and a loyal, growing customer base.

Acumatica's cloud-native architecture matters. A lot of legacy ERP players are retrofitting cloud onto an on-premise foundation, and that's a meaningful structural disadvantage. Acumatica was built for the cloud, which gives it a real edge as mid-market companies modernize their back-office infrastructure.

You know, what stood out culturally was the strength of the partner ecosystem and how deeply Acumatica has invested in those relationships. That's not something you manufacture. It reflects a consistent philosophy about how you go to market and how you treat the people who are extending your reach. The team also had a scrappiness and customer centricity that you don't always see in companies that have been around as long as Acumatica has.

Specifically, you know, the ERP and software, AI is moving from a feature to a platform shift, and ERP is one of the categories where it has real near-term impact. The data's already in the system, transactions, workflows, approvals, inventory movements, and AI can surface patterns, automate decisions, and reduce the manual overhead that's always been the fic-friction point in ERP adoption.

The companies that figure out how to embed AI in the workflow in a way that actually reduces user burden rather than adding complexity, they're gonna have a durable advantage. I mean, Acumatic is leaning very hard on bringing this AI forward into the product. Vista also has an internal group that we call our agentic factory that is focused on helping our portfolio companies accelerate their agentic opportunities, and Acumatic is partnering with this team, and I'm really excited to see what the results will be.

[00:07:01] David De Rego: Cloud native architecture, a loyal partner ecosystem, and a clear AI roadmap. That's a powerful combination that can help real businesses transform their operations and accelerate growth. Speaking of growth, no conversation this season illustrated what acceleration and operational growth look like better than our next guest.

Episode 2 took us somewhere unexpected, in the world of endurance motorsports. Andy Williamson is the Director of Venture Engineering, a company that builds and races high-performance vehicles, manufactures parts for Formula 1 teams, and works with some of the most exciting clients in the automotive world.

His story speaks for itself.

[00:07:42] Andy Williamson: Motorsport is quite often the cutting edge of technology, whether that be on the vehicle itself, uh, the systems that it uses, you know, extracting the maximum performance from the vehicle. It also supports the driver, uh, you know, so we're often using technology and data to help them to improve and to get the best and most consistent lap times from them, for example.

Uh, but it also drives everything that we do back at the factory to make sure that we're prepared in the best possible way, that the car arrives with the best chance, um, of winning. And so the racing that we undertake is endurance racing, so we're racing quite often for 12 or 24 hours. And so the preparation of the vehicle, the preparation of the team, the drivers, et cetera, is super critical to make sure that we can perform across a long period of time, um, and give ourselves the best opportunity to win.

So we're using tools and AI to help us to forecast and predict what's going to happen in the race, to help us make live decisions upon the strategy that we're going to use, um, the driver lineup and the rotations that we're gonna implement, and how we respond to the changing track conditions, what our competitors are doing, how the race is unfolding.

The good example of this was last year, we raced at the 24 Hours of Barcelona, and we ended up winning the race after 24 hours by 1.7 seconds, I think it was. Wow.

[00:08:57] David De Rego: Wow. Amazing So

[00:08:58] Andy Williamson: across 24 hours, that w- that was the difference between standing on the top step and, uh, taking second place. So, you know- Yeah

any number of small factors across the whole of the race could have altered the outcome, uh, dramatically

[00:09:11] David De Rego: A 24-hour race decided by 1.7 seconds. Think about that. Every pit stop, every tire change, every data point collected across the entire weekend fed into a margin smaller than most people can perceive.

And that foundation, the right systems, the right data, is what allows businesses to expand and scale. Just ask Ralph Torres, VP of Operations at Eastman Music Company, who has grown from 2 companies to 11 in 18 years. Here's Ralph

[00:09:43] Ralph Torres: The last three companies we added, I did it myself. Our, our VAR didn't even help with it.

Obviously, they helped set up all the work in the past to do it. Literally, our VAR was on vacation while I created the OBO company. It's... He didn't even know about it until he got back from vacation, and we were joking about it that, uh, that's not needed. You know, if you have someone who's dedicated and willing to learn the product and learn the software, then you can do a lot of things on your own where I wouldn't even thought possible.

Even when we first started with, with Acumatica. When we added the new OBO company, I already had my attribute structure for stock items, so as soon as my product data guy just added those, and then, oh, we just need to add that company branch I- the company ID to all of our reports. It wasn't automatic, but we knew exactly what needed to be done.

I, I have one guy who does most of our reporting. He was just able to add it to all the reports. He's like, "Yeah, y- the ones that we look at every day, I'll get those done by the end of the week. The ones that we need for monthly reviews, I'll get those ones done by the end of the month, no problem." And everything just fits underneath because the, the infrastructure on the bottom is all the same.

You have to figure out how to make your big buckets flow into your small buckets, and what does matter to you for reporting and then what doesn't matter to you for reporting. Once you do that work, the infrastructure and the system's set up in Acumatica to make it easy. That's what makes it dynamic to me, and scalable, and easy to add once you have that structure under-

[00:11:09] David De Rego: The biggest takeaway here, it's never one big move.

It's a thousand small, well-executed moves made possible by having the right system and data in place. That idea of building the right foundation connects directly to what comes next. Needless to say, AI dominated the headlines throughout this past year. We made a point of bringing in voices that could cut through the noise.

Jon Reed, Co-founder of diginomica, has been tracking the ERP market for decades. Let's hear his perspective on where AI fits and what businesses actually need to do before they can unlock its value.

[00:11:45] Jon Reed: The ERP industry is, is under a little bit of a challenge to justify itself in the era of, quote-unquote, "AI."

Mm-hmm. And a lot of this comes from the fact that there is so much kind of AI fever or fever dreams, I might say.

[00:11:59] Jon Pollock: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:00] Jon Reed: That they, they want to... People who buy into that want to believe that business software will just get demolished, and you'll just be interacting with these large language models, and they will build what you need, and they'll know everything you need.

To some extent, I think it's healthy because it challenges ERP vendors to say, "Okay, well, why aren't you valuable?" Because in, in that vision, an ERP system at best would become like an API call for some kind of third-party AI service that can just do automatically what you want. Mm-hmm. Whereas actually the data's coming out really different, and I just wrote this week about a, a major CEO study done by PWC.

Mm-hmm. And what it found was that only one in 10 customers basically were achieving value out of AI at this point in time. Mm-hmm. But what was interesting was what that 10% were doing right, and it had to do with getting your foundation right. Mm-hmm. It had to do with getting your data right, getting your processes right.

And I would also add getting your culture and organizational sort of discipline in the right direction also. And as it turns out, it's when you add AI to those components that it starts to deliver real value. Mm-hmm. And so how that brings me back to Acumatica and ERP in general, is that I view ERP as one very strong way of essentially building that foundation, right?

Yeah.

So when you think about a typical Acumatica new customer that might be upgrading from, you know, older accounting systems or, you know, you might see QuickBooks or Great Plains sometimes, or it could just be spreadsheets. When you see them migrating to Acumatica- Mm-hmm ... they're also going through a, a process, a disciplined process, 'cause Acumatica is not just ERP software, it's a platform.

And so that's what I like about what Acumatica does, is it, it puts people in a position where they can start thinking about consuming AI based on quality data and, and, and- Yes ... and, and good processes. Because if you don't have that, if you put AI on top of bad data and bad processes- Yeah ... you are gonna get a bad result.

And, and we're starting to see that in study after study

[00:13:57] David De Rego: Foundation first, data quality first, process discipline first, then AI. That's not a limitation. That's how you accelerate with AI, and John Reed wasn't the only one saying it. Mickey North Rizza is Group Vice President of IDC's Enterprise Software, one of the most respected research firms in the industry.

She came to Acumatica Summit with hard numbers on exactly where small and medium-sized businesses are putting their money and why. Here's Mickey.

[00:14:27] Mickey North Rizza: We also have something we called our worldwide SMB survey.

[00:14:30] Patryk Kubiszyn: Okay.

[00:14:31] Mickey North Rizza: Okay? And we do that, uh, I think it's, like, mid to late year every year.

Mm-hmm.

I'm gonna give you 2025 data.

Okay. When we looked at the data compared to 2024, 20% of organizations, SMB organizations, said they were going to invest in AI, and it wasn't that big. Okay. It was more on analytics, right? That was, and that was a secondary choice. When we looked at it in 2025, it more than doubled to 52%.

Hmm.

And they, when we asked them why, they said they need to scale faster.

Hmm. And they see AI as the opportunity to scale faster.

Okay.

We asked one more question around that. Mm-hmm. And that is, where do you expect to put that investment in? And what we heard from SMBs were financial management and business operations.

Okay.

ERP. So it's all trending in that direction. Okay. I don't see it going away anytime soon.

[00:15:16] David De Rego: The numbers don't lie. More and more businesses see the benefit of modernization and operational transformation and are doing the hard work that comes with change. Our ERP podcast shared a great example of this. Patryk Kubiszyn is VP of Systems and Processes at Smith & Long, a multi-trade construction services company.

When they outgrew their old system, the hardest part wasn't the technology, it was the people. Here's Patrick

[00:15:44] Patryk Kubiszyn: Changing an ERP system for the company is probably one of the most significant changes that any company can go through.

[00:15:50] David De Rego: For sure.

[00:15:50] Patryk Kubiszyn: And knowing that, that there was gonna be a lot of challenges, we had to treat it more than just a software change.

We had to treat it as an organizational change. That meant that we had to do a lot of communication and explaining the why- Mm-hmm ... business needed this change. It wasn't just about changing the system for the sake of using something more modern. We had to modernize our processes, we had to become scalable, we had to become flexible.

We needed to keep up with our growing business. We were not going to successfully grow on our old system. Yeah. So we had to make sure that that why, which is a very strong cultural pillar within our company, explaining the why, was communicated very clearly. Communication was big. Mm-hmm. We had to introduce a lot of champions into each department, make sure that they understood the narrative and were helping us convey it to everybody.

Lots of training, and something that was very important for us was that because Acumatica is flexible enough for us to change, we're actually able to do these micro changes during the implementation. Mm-hmm. As we're going through all the processes and people are giving us some sort of feedback when they're seeing it for the first time, we're able to incorporate those very quickly.

Made the adoption a lot, uh, smoother for us. There's something else that kinda like surprised me, um, that has come out of it, and I'm very proud of the company for that, is the acceptance to change.

[00:17:11] David De Rego: Ah, nice.

[00:17:12] Patryk Kubiszyn: So all of a sudden now, sometimes to my detriment, the company is very happy to be requesting changes in their software- Ah

system. Now we are very prone and accepting of doing a change. Nice. Just because we're doing something today doesn't mean that we have to do it next week or next month. People are requesting changes all the time. We're working on them. We're implementing it into the company. We're scrapping processes altogether that we, like, we thought they were gonna be the next big hit, but even if they fail, it was fantastic because, uh, the company is willing to quickly shift gears.

So- Yeah ... Acumatica, in a way, has more than just opened the, the door on reporting and decision-making. It, it's built this, uh, a cultural enablement to adapt with them.

[00:17:58] David De Rego: Treat it as an organizational change, not a software change. Explain the why, build champions, and then get ready for your team to surprise you because once they see that the system can change with them, they never stop improving it.

To close out our season one recap, we wanted to leave you with a look at where Acumatica is headed, building AI directly into the product in a way that empowers people and enables organizations to reach new heights. Episode nine gave you a deep dive into Acumatica's latest product update and how AI is built directly in the platform in a way that is practical and actually makes sense for growing businesses.

Acumatica CPO, Jon Pollock, and SVP of Vertical Solutions, Jeremy Larsen, laid out the roadmap clearly.

[00:18:42] Jon Pollock: The key for us is as we build AI into our work streams, into our product flows, AI should augment the human expertise and not replace it. And so we're doing a very conscious effort how we roll out AI.

First, we want it to be an assistant to them, and so we're rolling out AI Assistant, which will give them, um, guidance and help them complete tasks faster and will do it in a natural way that feels natural to the end user, uh, basically giving them superhuman powers as they engage with the platform.

Second is decision support. AI reporting and anomaly detection will help them quickly identify areas that need attention, be it workflows and/or data that just needs specific attention in order for them to optimize their business. And then lastly, automation. So AI helps auto-automate repetitive tasks and workflows that allows the teams to focus on high-value work.

And we do that building trust with the user over time. So over time, as we assist, provide decision support, then we'll have the opportunity to graduate to automation. And so, um, we'll increment those capabilities into the product, starting with that assistance, rolling out decisions report, and then finally, uh, doing automation across the various different workflows.

[00:20:07] Jeremy Larsen: What I'll add to that is, you know, in true Acumatica form, we attacked AI at a platform level first. And so over the last several releases, we've been making progress on a platform level that have, has built really a strong foundation For the user experience to be built on top of. And so when we talk about AI Studio and the insights, uh, and automation that that's going to deliver through AI Assistant, it's been done, um, with the foundation in mind.

It also is fe- going to feed one of our strategic pillars around adaptability and extensibility. You know, allowing our partners and developer community and, and customers with, you know, a developer arm of their business to extend the product even further, um, by automating pretty much every workflow in the system can be extended with AI, um, with this release.

Really exciting for our customers and, and ecosystem.

[00:21:12] David De Rego: That practical step-by-step approach to AI really captures what this season and what this podcast is all about, and that's exactly the conversation we'll be delivering to you in season two. As we wrap up the first season of the Acumatica ERP Podcast, I wanna take a moment to thank every guest who joined us this season, and for the invaluable insights they shared.

And of course, thank you, our listeners. This show exists because of you. Season One was about building the foundation, understanding where the market is heading, hearing from the customers doing the hard work of transformation, and starting to see what it looks like when AI is built the right way. We've covered a lot of ground, and we're just getting started.

Coming this fall, Season Two will focus on how practical AI features and ERP capabilities are transforming the workplace. We'll go beyond the conversations and into the real businesses, real workflows, and the real results that growing businesses are achieving with ERP technology. More customers, more partners, more of the conversations and insights that matter to growing businesses.

Thank you again for being part of the Acumatica ERP podcast community. I'm David Drego, and we'll see you in Season Two