Acumatica Summit: AI ‘Becoming the Digital Coworker’Acumatica Summit: AI ‘Becoming the Digital Coworker’

ACUMATICA SUMMIT — Artificial intelligence will drive new levels of business performance as the technology evolves to fulfill its capabilities.

That was the word Monday from channel-focused cloud enterprise resource planning vendor Acumatica, which is holding its annual conference this week in Las Vegas.

“We see AI becoming the digital coworker in the not-so-far future,” said Miten Mehta, chief engineering officer, during a demonstration of the company’s not-yet-live interactive assistant.

Acumatica is saving its full slate of product and upgrade announcements for Tuesday, but Mehta did give a brief preview during the Acumatica Summit day one keynote. On that note, users and partners can expect “intelligent advisors” that respond to spoken or typed inquiries. Mehta shared a live demo of the assistants but said they won’t be available just yet.

“As we add more functionality … and make sure that the quality meets our bar, we will give it to you,” he said.

There’s also AI automation, which does not require human intervention to operate. Think invoice categorization, case resolution and summary generation as ways to use this feature, Mehta said. The automation works with the AI assistants as well. 

Acumatica Summit: A Look at Key Stats

CEO John Case spent much of his time on stage sharing statistics around growth, and not just that related to Acumatica itself. The vendor only serves small and midmarket enterprises, he reiterated, and these businesses generate 44% of gross domestic product in the United States. That amount to one-half of total U.S. employment, Case said.

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Plus, he added, a recent McKinsey & Co. study shows that SMEs account for $226 billion of overall tech spend in 2024.

“It’s remarkable,” Case said. “It's a real testimony to the economic power that many of you here represent — and, don't ever forget, we're also one of you in this customer segment.”

Acumatica's John Case

From there, Case recounted other advancements, including the embedding of technology payments into the Acumatica system and AI-powered anomaly detection as examples of two of the “350 new feature enhancements” unveiled last year.

“The product has really kept growing with your needs,” Case said, stating that that’s reflected by “record renewal rates” and “thousands of new customers.” Acumatica is privately held so it’s difficult to independently verify those statements.

Next, Case further said that Acumatica signed more than 50 new value-added resellers in 2024. That comes to a total of “100 new partners across types, many of them coming from ecosystems that are becoming less and less friendly,” Case noted.

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Looking ahead to 2025, Case said Acumatica predicts that “roughly $500 billion − a half-trillion dollars − of economic activity” will run through its ERP platform.

“That's from you,” he said. “That's an incredible number — a half-trillion dollars. And broad usage of the product continues to climb.”

Acumatica Summit: Back to AI, What’s on the Way

Returning to the present moment, Acumatica CEO Case gave a deeper glimpse of what’s to come from the company around AI. 

“[W]e’re building AI directly into our existing workflows, including at the industry level,” he said. “We're leveraging the power of our cloud to integrate rapidly changing AI capabilities, bringing them to you. And all of this, we're doing all of this while maintaining our foundational principles on customer data ownership and data control, that continues to be the most important thing for us.”

However, Case said, “AI is only as effective as the data that it learns from.”

With that in mind, Acumatica aims to serve as SMEs’ “key data source,” he said.

“I increasingly think ERP is the spine or the central nervous system of your organization, and therefore the data is incredibly valuable and it's incredibly important to get right,” Case said. “But it also means the opportunity to have impact on performance is outsized. It's massive. And with Acumatica as your key data source, you will be able to leverage advances in AI as we bring them to you.”

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The company will reveal more on that front during day two of its 2025 Acumatica Summit on Tuesday.