Council Post: Reclaiming Control Of Your Enterprise Software Strategy With Agentic AI ERP

Joe Locandro is an experienced CIO. He is often sought to provide thought leadership in Technology, Innovation and AI.getty​Enterprise software decisions are getting harder to navigate. Vendors are accelerating...

July 22, 2026

Joe Locandro is an experienced CIO. He is often sought to provide thought leadership in Technology, Innovation and AI.

getty

​Enterprise software decisions are getting harder to navigate. Vendors are accelerating upgrade deadlines, shifting product strategies and framing their latest platforms as the only credible path to innovation. Upgrade now, the message goes, or face unsupported systems, compliance risks and competitive obsolescence. But for many organizations, these moves often create more disruption for the business than value.​

IT leaders have far more control over their software road map than vendors want them to believe. Instead of rushing into the next upgrade just because a vendor says it is time, IT leaders need to step back and reassess software decisions with a focus on control, flexibility and long-term value. That also means taking a serious look at agentic AI to get more from existing systems, improve speed-to-value and increase business agility.​

Whose Road Map Is This, Anyway?

Businesses are being pressured to make major technology decisions that don’t necessarily support their operational needs or long-term goals. The situation is especially difficult for companies running stable, mission-critical enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that have been running successfully for years, sometimes decades.​

These platforms are deeply integrated into everything from business processes and manufacturing lines to financial operations and supply chains. Yet vendors say that unless customers migrate to the latest platforms, support will end, innovation will be limited and future capabilities will be out of reach.​

This is the situation facing tens of thousands of SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) customers today, being pushed toward SAP S/4HANA Cloud and a subscription-based model. It’s no surprise that fewer than one-third of SAP's 30,000-plus ERP customers have made that transition. Of those who have moved forward, nearly 60% find their migrations running behind schedule and over budget, most often because of underestimated complexity, scope expansion and internal capacity constraints.​

Vendor Vision Vs. Customer Reality

The deeper problem is strategic misalignment. Research shows 75% of ERP strategies lack strong alignment with overall business strategy. And by 2027, more than 70% of ERP initiatives will fail to deliver expected benefits, with 25% failing catastrophically.​

Vendors, of course, offer a familiar solution: their newest AI features. Yet capabilities bundled into an upgrade rarely deliver the promised business value. The effort to adopt them, the resources needed to configure and maintain them, and the organizational change required to use them often outweigh the benefits. By 2030, more than 70% of purchased ERP AI capabilities are projected to go unused. Committing to a vendor’s AI road map before your organization is ready replaces flexibility with dependency—surrendering too much control for too little certainty.​

Before signing on to a multiyear program, you owe it to your organization to ask whose agenda the upgrade actually serves.​

Innovation Lives Above The Core

What tends to disappear in vendor conversations is the value of what organizations already have. A mature ERP system is audited, compliant, deeply customized and fully depreciated. After a decade or more of investment, it continues delivering value at a fraction of the cost of replacement. So why disrupt something that works?​

The capital that would otherwise fund a two-to-five-year upgrade cycle can instead go toward targeted innovation beyond the core. That is exactly where agentic AI ERP comes in.​

Think of it as two separate layers working together: The ERP provides the stable, compliant foundation the business depends on, while agentic AI sits on top, orchestrating workflows, connecting data and driving decisions across the enterprise. Preserving the core and innovating on top of it is faster, less disruptive and more economical than upgrading or replatforming.​

Here are three steps for IT leaders ready to gain a competitive advantage with agentic AI ERP:

• Get governance in place before anything else. Before broad deployment, establish an AI steering committee that brings together legal, HR, IT and business leadership to evaluate use cases, define what agents can access and approve how they operate. In our company’s own journey, we treat this structure the same way you treat a driver's license: Training comes before the keys. That foundation enables adoption to scale responsibly.

• Think platform, not project. Each agentic AI deployment should contribute to a shared infrastructure rather than stand alone. Organizations that approach agentic AI this way build foundational capabilities that span dozens of workflows and shift the ROI conversation from justifying each agent individually to achieving compounding returns across the enterprise.

• Start small and prove it. Choose one contained, repetitive workflow that crosses system boundaries and demonstrate that agents can safely access core systems before moving to production. With modern low-code and no-code tooling, deployments that once took months or years can now deliver measurable results in a matter of weeks.​

The Best Move Is Yours to Make

Enterprise software will keep evolving, but there is a big difference between changing on a vendor’s schedule and changing on your own terms. Organizations that resist vendor-driven upgrades and base technology decisions on real business needs will be better positioned to control costs, limit disruption and invest where it matters most. Agentic AI ERP strengthens that position by helping businesses innovate on top of existing systems while keeping control of their road map.

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?