The four ERP decisions finance and HR leaders now face
In our new white paper,
The Agent in the Back Office, written with my colleague Marc Selzer at Preos, we set out the four decisions facing finance and HR leaders over the next eighteen months.
None of them is “should we replace our ERP?”.
1. Which ERP platform bets do you make, and which do you defer?
You cannot adopt every platform on offer, and you cannot wait for the dust to settle either. For most back-office work, the sensible default is to push as much as you can onto the vendor that already knows your function, holds your data and carries the regulatory burden, not a standalone AI vendor that may be acquired or run out of road.
MIT’s research is blunt: 95 per cent of enterprise AI pilots have delivered no measurable profit impact, and buying from a vendor beats building it yourself roughly two to one.
One CHRO we know felt let down by the Workday platform he had bought in 2017, and half a dozen AI-native HR vendors were circling. What won the argument was not that Workday’s own AI was best. It was that the smaller players would likely be acquired, run short of capital, or never know the HR function as deeply.
He picked a recruiting specialist called Paradox. Workday acquired it soon after, which rather made the point.
2. How do you model and govern AI consumption pricing?
Flex credits have no hard spend cap. The vendor will not stop the service when you blow through your entitlement; the overage simply lands on your bill.
There is an unglamorous first move that works here. Most Workday installations have integrations pinging the platform every few minutes for data that has not changed, and under consumption pricing that waste is now metered and visible.
An integration optimisation review can take a real percentage off the bill before the AI conversation has even started.
3. Where does your ERP vendor liability sit?
The Mobley v Workday case in the US has allowed the argument that an AI screening vendor can be directly liable for discriminatory hiring outcomes, not just the employer who uses the tool.
Workday’s own filings put 1.1 billion rejected applications in scope. “The vendor made the decision” is not a defence a regulator will accept, and a human who rubber-stamps an algorithm is not the “meaningful human involvement” the ICO has said it will test.
4. Are you ready for the AI regulation deadlines?
The FRC’s AI guidance and the ICO’s recruitment guidance both landed in March 2026. The EU AI Act’s high-risk obligations for HR apply in full from August 2026. SAP’s ECC maintenance ends in 2027.
Each of these carries lead times measured in quarters, not weeks.
The 70 per cent of AI transformation everyone forgets
Underneath all of it sits BCG’s 10-20-70 rule: 10 per cent of the value is in the algorithm, 20 per cent in the data and technology, and 70 per cent in the people and the processes.
The organisations that get embarrassed in 2027 will be the ones that bought the agent and never redesigned the process around it.
Don’t get blinded by the AI light, and don’t assume you should build it yourself.
The ERP is not dead. The commercial model around it is, and the real work now is to govern, instrument and augment what you already have, under tighter regulation and with a clearer view of the cost and the liability than most boards currently hold.
Download the full paper
That is the conversation your board should be having. Our new paper, The Agent in the Back Office, is a good place to start it.
You can download it here.
Or read the interactive version here.
If any of this is relevant to a decision you are weighing up, Marc and I would be glad to compare notes. You can reach us at info@changeassociates.com.
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Read the interactive report
