Enterprise Apps Unpacked

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 returns are more susceptible to fraud and abuse. As a result, companies are looking for ways to reduce thei...

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 be more essential than ever in making this new age of industrial AI a reality in asset-intensive industr...

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 emerging as an effective tool for amplifying human-centered leadership. At the same time, human-center...

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 realistic expectations, establishes clear guardrails, and provides the right programming tools and trai...

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 predictors of success. Hiring assessments are mostly digitized and conducted over computers, but they te...

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 advantage, but in ways that align sufficiently with the goals of their organization, rather than resist AI e...

"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 environment, make decisions and take action. Practical business applications are already emerging. The...

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 agents to communicate with each other and coordinate their activities across enterprise applications, wo...

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 unprecedented goals: building an EV for a base price of $35,000 and completing the development cycle in three yea...

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 aggressively added special-purpose AI agents and development tools for building custom agents and beefed up its d...

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 dependent on humans, and could ultimately be the ideal collaborator? The head of an AI research lab ass...

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, and ultimately make credit available to more consumers and businesses. But AI lending also carries the...

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 applicants to misrepresent their qualifications by falsifying resumes and cover letters and tweaking them to ma...

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 minutes to complete, and they often have biases that cause them to miss opportunities. AI-driven dynamic p...

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 executed move can break an organization's financial processes and expose sensitive data, raising signif...

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 optimization and logistics. But has IoT lived up to its initial growth spurt and hype of a decade ago? Recent indi...

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 announced similar layoffs. Meanwhile, software vendors announced reductions that were explicitly caused...

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 overseas labor. But there are positive aspects to AI's impact on manufacturing jobs. Many workers are learni...

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 to monitor and optimize resource use. Now IoT sensors are increasingly paired with digital twins and A...

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 out educational content in minutes. Now AI-powered search is sparking another transformation as em...

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 approach that aims to solve these data problems by basing AI models on standard, industry-specific busi...

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 with generative and agentic AI. In this episode, we examine how AI can make procurement more effective and...

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 encourage AI use without mandating it, the kinds of training that work best and how to develop a curriculum t...

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, and their potential uses. Featuring: Eric Liu , founder and CEO of TwinMatrix Technologies In today’s ep...

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 vendors—the people who are truly in the know—about important developments in ERP, HR and supply chain syste...