Artificial Intelligence (AI) is impacting every facet of business today, including finance teams that rely on Sage X3 to manage and unify their operations. But questions remain about how best to utilize AI productivity assistants like Sage X3 Copilot, as well as more advanced agentic AI capabilities on the near horizon. We sat down with Chris Farrell, Vice President of Sage X3 at NexTec Group to discuss AI and the future of ERP, how NexTec is using AI internally, and what Sage X3 clients need to know to successfully implement AI in their organizations.
Chris, thanks for sitting down to talk about AI and ERP. Let’s kick things off with the number one question you hear most often from Sage X3 clients about AI?
The number one thing we hear is excitement around AI. Customers are genuinely excited about how AI can impact their business. Many of them are already using AI internally or using third-party AI tools alongside their ERP and other technical solutions. But the biggest question we’ve been fielding lately is about the roadmap Sage is producing. There’s been a lot of excitement generated at Sage Future and the announcements that AI is coming to X3, and people are hungry for it. They want to learn more.
They want to see how they can use it to streamline their business, freeing their people up for more value-added work instead of mundane, repetitive tasks that AI can handle. The more advanced customers are looking for ways to build that intelligence into their planning or their financials — to flag areas they might be missing. It’s a big topic not just on the transactional side of Sage X3, but on the business intelligence side too, in terms of how we help customers decipher and interpret their data, and surface hidden patterns an AI tool could show them.
Sage CoPilot is already live and embedded in Sage X3. It’s still early days, but what are you hearing from X3 clients about CoPilot? How are clients using it, and where are they seeing results?
Most clients today are using Sage CoPilot to make the interface more interactive, to search out information faster, and handle simpler tasks. The next wave is agentic AI, which is starting to come out within the Sage software. That’s what will perform transactions, interpret data, and actually produce results for you, rather than just returning results. That’s where I think we’ll see the biggest bang for the buck. But customers are inquisitive, and they’re using Copilot to their advantage. In a lot of ways, it’s a perfect training ground: get comfortable with the simpler forms of AI, learn how it works, how it learns, and get a feel for how to pose questions to it the right way. That’s only going to help as AI grows in its own intelligence and functionality.
Most agree that AI is about evolving roles rather than replacing headcount. If we think about AI adoption in finance and operations, what do those evolved roles look like day-to-day?
With the introduction of AI into any business, it must be looked at as a way to improve the work product we’re putting out, not necessarily to replace the work being done today by humans or ERP systems. AI will change the way people work and how they’re active within the business — they’ll become more strategic. They’ll spend more time on problem solving and issue resolution, making decisions further in advance rather than the tactical, day-to-day decisions AI can make for them.
AI will give them the ability to process and interpret data much faster, so they can make better business decisions on their own. The same applies to our industry: I don’t think we’ll see AI replace an ERP consulting or implementation partner, but AI will enable us to do our job better, solve customer problems, and work with clients in a more efficient, higher-quality way. I see it as taking what a human can do to the next level.
A lot of the fears we’re hearing now about AI echo the fears that came about when ERP emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, around the Y2K era. ERP was viewed almost as a plague. Yes, it was going to help run your organization better, but it was also going to eliminate jobs. It didn’t do that. If anything, it created jobs and new industries. Were there areas where headcount was reduced over time? Sure. But it also created many new roles and helped people do their jobs better.
I don’t have a crystal ball, and I’m no fortune teller, but my belief is we’ll see the same with AI as it matures and expands. Businesses will find new ways to use it and, as a result, repurpose their people into more value-added roles. AI will create jobs in the long run rather than eliminate them.
NexTec has a company-wide mandate to leverage AI to improve the quality of the services and solutions it delivers to clients. How is NexTec using AI internally?
We’re working with AI now to make our discovery phase faster, digesting requirements from a customer and using AI to help produce an output that used to take days of manual effort to create from scratch. Now our consultants can fine-tune that AI-generated output, have a conversation with it to clarify questions, and produce a much better design or blueprint document — one that ensures we’re building the solution the right way and that both parties are on the same page.
We’re also starting to explore how to use AI for data migration, to reduce human intervention in data cleansing and make sure the right fields are populated correctly, among other things.
And there’s more to come: how can we use AI to generate test scripts without the customer having to do it themselves? How can AI help with month-end close? How can it speed up testing and quality assurance? There are all sorts of things we’re experimenting with across the whole delivery cycle that will ultimately benefit our customers — whether that’s a faster time to market or documentation that’s less error-prone and more specific.
Ultimately, we want to reduce total cost of ownership and cost of implementation while raising the quality of what we deliver to our customers.
The NexTec Sage X3 team works with a lot of leading manufacturers and distributors across food and beverage, chemicals, pharmaceuticals/nutraceuticals, and other process manufacturing industries. Where do you see AI in Sage X3 delivering the most immediate value for these clients and industries specifically?
In the industries we serve, the clients we work with are dealing with large amounts of complex data around forecasting and historical trends — it comes down to interpreting what product mix or inventory levels they’ll need in the future. How do they stock their raw materials and supplies? How do they position a new product, whether it’s a food product, a discrete product, or something for a distribution company? How can they prepare for the future and model what’s coming?
That’s where AI helps: processing complicated data sets, thinking through situations, risks, and hypothetical scenarios to help you do your job better and put the company in a stronger position to foresee what’s coming. As we’ve talked about, it’ll certainly help with the more mundane tasks and simplify processes without needing human intervention. But it’ll also improve the quality of the work or the product — things like proposals or customer service replies. In these areas, with the right coaching and oversight from a human counterpart, AI can produce outstanding results.
There are concerns, especially among finance leaders, about the accuracy of AI today. We’ve all read about AI hallucinations and have likely experienced them firsthand. How much do finance and operations leaders need to trust the AI, and where does human oversight come in?
With anything AI-related, human oversight is a necessity. Even the best AI produces output that, to my eye or yours, may not be quite right for a given customer or situation. So having that checkpoint, that quality assurance layer where AI isn’t blindly trusted, but is trusted to the point where it can help you run your business while you still double-check its output, will be necessary for the near future. Beyond that, as AI produces answers or output for you, there will inevitably be pieces it misses. Having that human interaction to help train it better, understand its output, or add the personal touch will be important.
As for the trustworthiness of AI overall, Sage is putting a huge amount of time into that, which is one reason they’re not rushing too much AI to market too fast. They want to make sure the AI they’re using within Copilot is trained appropriately, understands the system it’s working with, doesn’t use fictional data, and doesn’t have access to an overly broad amount of data — so it stays within its lane and can actually help you.
The data needs to be secure, and the history it’s drawing on needs to be tested and validated, so the AI produces a trusted answer. That’s an area Sage has talked about extensively at recent customer events and in their press releases, and it’s something that should really excite Sage X3 users in terms of how it’s being rolled out. On the surface, it may look like they are a little behind some competitors, but I think the end product will be better and more trustworthy overall.
For an existing Sage X3 customer who’s been on the platform for a while, what’s your message about AI and the Future of ERP: What’s coming and what should they be doing to prepare?
What Sage X3 clients should be doing today to prepare is making sure their systems are up to date, from a couple of different perspectives. First, if they’ve been on the system for a number of years, they should make sure it reflects their current business processes. That’s something we’ve done for a number of customers — revisiting them after years in a live state, to make sure their current business priorities and processes match what was implemented three, four, five, or even ten years ago, and that they’re taking full advantage of the system and the latest best practices.
If they start by addressing their processes, they can address their technology at the same time — meaning their Sage X3 environment will need to be on the latest version as these AI agents are released and new functionality comes out. A lot of what Sage is releasing, whether it’s AI-specific or just core functionality, requires being on the latest technical version of the software to take advantage of it.
We just finished an outreach campaign with some of our customers to bring them up to the latest patch set in Sage X3, which gets them current and lets them take advantage of functionality in the next patch set, or the one after. And if they elect to move to a SaaS version of the software, being on that latest patch is what’s required to make that move and get the more streamlined release of AI functionality. So, from a tactical point of view, what customers really need to focus on is making sure their systems and processes reflect the most current version of both their business and the software.
Beyond that, have a plan for AI: Understand where in your business you’d like to use it, and wait for the agentic AI capabilities to become available so you can take advantage of them. There’s an argument for taking advantage of what comes out first, but by the same token, what comes out first from Sage may not be the most advantageous for your business, so don’t rush it. If it’s an area where you don’t see the value, or you’re not comfortable using an AI solution or agent, don’t force it — wait for the right time.
I use a sports analogy for this a lot: in baseball, you don’t swing at the first pitch. Even if it’s a strike, you don’t have to swing at every one that comes your way. You wait for the pitch you can really hit. My advice would be: Get yourself set, watch what’s coming, and when the right opportunity shows up, that’s the one to use and test. Some you’ll let go by. That’s really in the best interest of your business, rather than chasing something cutting-edge that isn’t going to add value for you.
How can experienced ERP consultants like NexTec help guide clients toward effective and responsible use of AI within their organizations?
There are a couple of ways we can help. As Sage releases new AI capabilities, we get access ahead of our customers, so we’re installing it in our labs, working with it ourselves, and teaching our consultants how to consult on it, since it’s new technology they need to learn. We’re trying to stay ahead of that curve so that when the time comes, we have resources who can answer those questions for you right out of the gate and help with your AI journey.
The other thing we’ve been doing a lot lately is process improvement and review work — strategy and road mapping sessions with customers where we look at their processes today and find ways to use the latest solution to eliminate outdated or inefficient processes and run their business more cleanly with newer X3 functionality.
We’ve also been doing technical evaluations to make sure the system is tuned and running effectively at the base level, and sometimes doing a code review — looking at customizations to see what’s layered in there, whether they overlap, and whether they were built to proper standards for the type of code they’re written in.
If an implementation wasn’t done correctly, and then the optimizations or extensions on top of it weren’t done right either, you’re layering bad on top of bad. It’s important for customers to stop and look at the custom code and at their processes, and to recognize that, at some point, they may need to tear things down a bit to rebuild in the right way. You can only put so many coats of paint on a solution before it becomes a tangled web of customization and band-aid fixes that were never fully thought through.
These are the kinds of assignments we’ve taken on for our customers — not necessarily framed as AI work, but the kind of groundwork that lends itself to implementing and using AI down the line. Having current processes, current data, and a clear plan for where you want to go is the best way to start using this functionality and the AI that’s coming.
Chris Farrell is Vice President of Sage X3 at NexTec Group, managing the professional services and overall operations of the Sage X3 business. Chris brings a progressive 30-year career in professional services and systems implementation, positively impacting companies of various sizes across multiple industries. A relationship-oriented leader, Chris focuses on building strong rapport with his customers in order to drive successful outcomes and long-term customer satisfaction. Prior to joining NexTec, Chris held various executive and leadership positions with several leading ERP software publishers and professional services firms. Chris resides in the suburbs of Philadelphia. He is an avid sports fan and in his free time enjoys fishing and spending time with his family.
