Turning on the AI in your ERP is not a transformation
The large business software vendors now sell the destination outright: switch on our assistants and our agents, and your company runs itself. It is an attractive offer. It is also not what it seems, for three reasons.
It speeds up the old layout
A vendor's agents automate the processes as they are already configured in its software: the same steps, the same approvals, the same departments. That makes the existing organisation faster. It does not redesign it. The gains from AI come when the work itself is reorganised, and a catalogue of ready-made agents cannot reorganise your company for you.
Everyone gets the same agents
If your agents come from the same catalogue as your competitor's, they give you no advantage over that competitor. They are a cost, like electricity. What sets a company apart is what its systems learn from its own decisions and its own history, and that cannot be bought off the shelf.
One vendor holds every key
When the same supplier provides your records, the agents that act on them and the controls that oversee those agents, how far your company can go is decided by that supplier's roadmap. You can only move as fast as they ship.
When to buy it anyway
There are good reasons to switch these features on. If they make your existing systems cheaper or easier to run, use them. Just do not mistake that for changing how the company works. That still requires deciding where the company is going, rebuilding processes around what software can now do, and keeping control of your own data and logic.
Buy the features to run the old system more cheaply. Build the new one yourself.