Notes From My AI Bus Tour

When we first moved to our new house a few years ago and started taking walks around the neighborhood, one thing was apparent: The region was having a bumper crop year for bunnies — you’d see one about every 50 feet, and for each one seen I figured there were probably 10+ more unseen. Are we all feeling that way about AI yet? References to it are everywhere you look, some helpful and some just noise. Reactions about the term AI are often polarized, ranging from eye rolls to unbridled enthusiasm.

Attendees at Epicor’s Insights event in May definitely leaned toward the latter. Impressively, the software company that specializes in ERP for distributors, among other verticals, unveiled new tools to enable your business to design, build, and deploy your own AI agents in Prism, working inside the Epicor ERP system. The stack that enables this breakthrough comprises: Epicor Lux, a framework for agent design, governance, and security; Epicor Prism Agent Foundry, which provides a guided workspace environment for building and customizing AI agents; and Epicor Prism Agents, that operating within ERP workflows “to execute actions across data, processes, and decisions,” they said. There was also an emphasis on improved natural language functionality in Epicor’s software, designed to give employees easy and rapid access to information they require.

The Insights event experience and the conversations I’ve had both there and in recent interviews with industry leaders — including the makers of robotics and automation featured in this issue on page 20 — have propelled me into a journey of exploration about AI business best practices. I recently hopped off the proverbial tour bus at a podcast called The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis for an episode titled, “How the Best Companies Use AI.” Thanks to host Nathaniel Whittemore, I discovered that McKinsey has published an “AI Transformation Manifesto.”

A USEFUL CHECKLIST

Its authors state, “The companies that are truly innovating with AI are doing something very different from their peers: They are conceptualizing and developing AI capabilities that reshape their products, services, core business processes, and organizational systems ... Their advantage, however, does not come from the tech they use … Their advantage comes from how—and how fast—they apply technology to solving real business problems at scale.”

The manifesto offers 12 themes that the authors say should become your “checklist for change and operate as guideposts along your transformation journey to value.” Follow the QR code at left to read it for yourself — you may just glean some secrets (or targets) that will become your unfair competitive advantage in the industrial distribution marketplace.

Theme No. 4 might be my favorite food for thought in the McKinsey piece: “Building the tech and AI muscle of your senior business leaders should be a top priority. We don’t have a single success story where senior business leaders were not in the driver’s seat. IT leaders can support the transformation, of course, but it’s business leaders who need to drive it.”

Thanks for reading!