What Companies Get Wrong About Agentic ERP

InnovationWhat Companies Get Wrong About Agentic ERPByManish Goyal,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 01, 2026, 06:00am EDTManish Goyal, Co-Founder of Dynamics Square, drives digital transformation via AI & Dynamics 365 with 17+ years of proven experience. gettyMost conversations around agentic ERP focus on what AI can do. But in many ERP modernization discussions I have been part of, the real problem appears much earlier. Companies often chase AI capabilities before defining the operational problems they are actually trying to solve.McKinsey’s latest State of AI research found that 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function. Yet only about one-third have begun scaling AI initiatives at the enterprise level, with most companies still operating in experimentation or pilot stages.Leadership teams get excited about intelligent automation features while ERP providers demonstrate AI-driven workflows and copilots. In that environment, AI does not solve operational inefficiencies. It tends to magnify the operational problems already present in the business. In many cases, the technology is not the primary issue. The bigger problem is that organizations expect AI to optimize workflows that were never operationally consistent to begin with.The Bigger Problem Is Operational ComplexityDuring one manufacturing ERP modernization discussion, I saw how years of process layering had gradually complicated even routine procurement decisions. Every operational exception introduced another approval step, eventually making routine purchasing activities dependent on multiple managerial checkpoints before action could move forward.The workflow appeared controlled, but it slowed procurement and created dependency on a small group of decision-makers. The larger issue was not the absence of AI capabilit...