Enterprise Apps Unpacked
by Informa TechTarget
ERP Confab features in-depth conversation concerning the vendors, trends, and technologies driving the enterprise resource planning market. TechTarget’s resident ERP expert Dave Essex chats with the C-suite executives, industry insiders, and expert observers, exploring everything ERP, from the factory floor to the metaverse, and everything in between.
Episodes
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Next-generation learning management systems in the age of AI
AI has disrupted educational technology more than most disciplines. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT cut production time for instructional materials from days down to minutes. Workers can find relevant content more easily, and subject matter experts use the tools to capture and share their...
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How open ERP APIs and data speed up agentic AI integration, deployment
The openness of ERP systems has become controversial when it comes to AI, which needs access to ERP data to learn, understand context and carry out transactions on behalf of users. ERP vendors are trying to figure out how to make their customers' data available to generative and agentic AI and…
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How to avoid data paralysis with a practical AI data strategy
The IT industry consensus seems to be that deploying reliable, enterprise-scale AI requires first getting the data in order. But dissenting voices say that's not necessarily the case and that it's better to achieve small wins earlier than wait for perfect data and risk losing out on…
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How Agile development principles can help with scaling AI deployment
Organizations are starting to recognize they can use AI not just to do existing work faster, but to change what kind of work is done and who does it. They need a plan for redesigning work itself. Popular methodologies for making business processes and workflows more efficient and productive, such...
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Harnessing AI to combat AI-driven candidate fraud
Candidate fraud has become a major problem in recruitment as job applicants use AI to blast employers with misleading or false information about their experience, education and skills. It also presents security risks by making organizations vulnerable to people with nefarious motives like...
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Beyond visibility: Decision intelligence in the supply chain
For years, visibility was the Holy Grail of supply chain technology. But increasingly, supply chain managers have more visibility than they can handle thanks to the real-time data flooding their dashboards and email systems. What they need now is some way to make sense of the data and act on it....
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Why EY built an entire AI platform for enterprise-scale agentic AI
Having completed the herculean task of training 400,000 employees to use generative AI, EY, the Big Four accounting and IT consultancy, found itself with another major challenge: how to respond to the opportunities and challenges of the agentic AI wave. EY's ambitious solution was to partner with...
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Find one strategic AI use case to ease pilot chaos, add business value
Many organizations struggle to develop an AI plan that marshals numerous pilots and employee applications in a unified strategy. Often, they have more pilots than they can manage and are unsure how to get business value from them. What if the answer is to narrow the focus and try to identify a...
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How one manufacturer blazed a smooth path to ERP cloud migration
Moving an on-premises ERP system to the cloud can be extremely challenging. That's especially true when the target is multi-tenant software-as-a-service ERP, which typically requires organizations to adopt generic business processes and give up customizations they built on the old ERP. SaaS ERP…
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Innovative reverse logistics app saves money while doing good
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...
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Agentic industrial AI and the indispensable connected worker
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…
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"Supermanagers" use AI to amplify human-centered leadership
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...
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Using a citizen developer program to boost AI deployments
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...
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Understanding the science behind AI-based hiring assessments
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...
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Career cure for AI phobia: Be a beekeeper, not a worker bee
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...
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Inside SAP R&D on the convergence of agentic and physical AI
"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...
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Plan a multi-agent orchestration framework for scalable AI
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...
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Direct materials sourcing technology a hub for manufacturers
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...
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Capgemini exec shares lessons from SAP agentic AI projects
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…
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AI-human symbiosis could be key for enterprise AGI software
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...
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AI-driven embedded lending emerges as digital finance option
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,...
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How AI amplifies resume fraud and other job seeker cheating
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…
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How a distributor used AI-driven dynamic pricing for quick ROI
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...
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Deloitte experts: Internal controls key in ERP cloud migration
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...
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Living up to the hype: Lessons from IoT supply chain wins
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…
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Google union organizer on AI job impact, working conditions
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...
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AI could save manufacturing from the baby boomer exodus
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...
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How AI-driven digital ecosystems can improve sustainability
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...
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Is AI-powered search the new corporate learning powerhouse?
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...
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Can industry process models fix the agentic AI data problem?
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...
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Can you really trust AI with procurement tasks?
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…
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How EY is training employees to use AI
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...
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Is geospatial data the real game changer for digital twins?
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…
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Introducing our new podcast: Enterprise Apps Unpacked!
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...
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SAP makes case for integrated “flywheel” of AI, data and applications
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...
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Developing products with spatial computing and virtual twins
An emerging technology called spatial computing combines virtual reality and augmented reality to enable location-aware digital interaction with the real world. It has big potential, but practical applications have been slow to arrive. A new offering from Dassault Systèmes, a French maker of 3D...
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Agentic AI from Salesforce and Oracle: The new leading edge of ERP?
For two glorious years, generative AI held sway as the AI darling among ERP vendors. But impressive as Gen AI might be, it's mostly limited to generating content and not really capable of the process management and decision making needed to reach the holy grail of AI: Fully autonomous artificial...
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Blackline CIO on the Customer Zero approach to AI
It's been said that the main job of a chief information officer is "keeping the lights on" – making sure an organization's IT systems are up to date, reliable and running smoothly. But CIOs of software vendors sometimes play an additional role as early users of products under development. The...
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SAP in 2025: S/4HANA, cloud pressure builds
A case can be made that for the past decade and a half, SAP has been almost entirely focused on two things: getting customers to adopt its next-generation ERP platform, S/4HANA, and shifting its development efforts from on-premises systems to the cloud – and getting customers to follow. Now, with...
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Sentient documents, anticipatory interfaces and the next UI
ERP vendors have been eager to ride the generative AI wave, and it has become commonplace for them to assert that machine learning and other types of AI will revolutionize the way people interact with business applications and data. AI is already enabling natural language data queries and…
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EY, SAP and the role of sustainability consulting
ERP increasingly serves as the hub of organizations' environmental sustainability strategies. But so far, it has mostly been used to standardize and automate the collecting and reporting of environmental, social and governance (ESG) data for customers, investors and regulators. There's a growing...
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How AI can improve ethical sourcing and sustainability
Supply chain sustainability is an ambitious strategy for managing the environmental, social and corporate governance impacts of product sourcing, manufacturing and delivery. But the inherent complexity of supply chains makes it difficult to ensure that each component in a product, from raw...
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Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and the ERP wars
Every major ERP vendor has strived to move its on-premises applications to the cloud and entice its customers to follow. Most still struggle to replicate the capabilities of their legacy ERP systems in software as a service (SaaS), and new products built in the cloud from the ground up tend to...
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Using AI, robots and analytics to improve warehouse visibility
Warehouses have long been the center of some of the most sophisticated information technology. RFID tags and readers, warehouse control systems, automated conveyors, voice picking and mobile devices are all commonly used to move goods and manage inventory with greater efficiency and precision....
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AI-enabled digital twins for smarter healthcare
Artificial intelligence and digital twins are probably the two most hyped information technologies of the 2020s. Yet both are already delivering practical benefits in fields ranging from industrial design and manufacturing to customer service and healthcare. They are especially powerful when used...
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Ubiquitous generative AI at SAP Sapphire 2024
Ever since generative AI's debut in late 2022, ERP vendors have raced to embed its human-like communication, research and analytical capabilities into their software. Besides responding to customer demand for AI, they're keen to use the technology to make their complex systems easier to use and...
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Understanding S/4HANA's impact on SAP customers
As the largest ERP vendor, SAP makes the software that runs much of the world's business. And whenever SAP makes a major change in its product portfolio, its customers often must scramble to adapt. No change in the past two decades has had more impact than SAP's decision to replace its popular…
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Digital adoption platforms for enterprise applications
E-learning technologies, such as online courses, instructional videos and augmented reality apps, are in hot demand at corporations. Much of that demand is driven by the sheer number and complexity of the software applications employees must learn to use. It's a massive training and onboarding...
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Generative AI puts humans at the center of the customer service loop
For years, artificial intelligence has helped to improve customer service by making automated chatbots more intelligent and enabling voice-controlled phone menus. But now the human-like communication abilities of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT are helping contact-center agents find quick...
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Implementing responsible AI in the enterprise
Organizations are quickly realizing that AI -- especially generative AI with its human-like creative and analytical capabilities -- raises legal, ethical and managerial issues that must be addressed before it can be deployed responsibly. Workers also need extensive training in developing and…
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About this show
ERP Confab features in-depth conversation concerning the vendors, trends, and technologies driving the enterprise resource planning market. TechTarget’s resident ERP expert Dave Essex chats with the C-suite executives, industry insiders, and expert observers, exploring everything ERP, from the factory floor to the metaverse, and everything in between.
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Informa TechTarget
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