Published on the 25/09/2026 | Written by Heather Wright

After Pronto’s 50 years, the value is in the minutiae…

“It’s the small things that could never really justify a business case on their own but ultimately do have an oversized impact on people’s day-in and day-out productivity that are providing the big wins,” says Stuart English of AI in ERP systems.

For English, CEO of Velocity Global, it’s not the AI moonshots dominating conference agendas which will bring real value to business, but instead the technology’s impact on the hundreds of small administrative tasks that quietly consume time across purchasing, inventory management, customer service and approvals. As businesses push for more AI capabilities from their ERP platforms, English says many are discovering the biggest opportunities are often hidden in the operational friction they’ve learned to live with.

English says demand for AI is no longer the issue.

“There’s often an impasse where a customer says, ‘just make us AI’, which is a little too broad and untethered to their world for it ever to be successful.”

“Almost all the customers we’ve sat down with are definitely seeing opportunity in AI,” he told iStart. But he notes “I don’t think that’s necessarily crystallised to specific use cases.”

Velocity Global, which implements and supports Pronto Software, works predominantly with organisations in manufacturing, logistics and distribution, typically employing between 50 and 250 staff. Across those sectors, English says interest in AI is widespread, particularly around productivity, forecasting, inventory management and customer service.

The challenge is turning that interest into something practical. Alongside issues with quality of data – “The system is only ever going to be as good as what you put into it” – he sees being clear on use cases as the biggest issue facing companies.

“There’s often an impasse where a customer says, ‘just make us AI’, which is kind of a little bit too broad and untethered to their world for it ever to be successful.”

Instead, he argues organisations need to approach AI much like any other technology investment by identifying where people spend time, where processes stall and where repetitive tasks create friction.

“Like any automation project, where is the time going? What’s the best bang for buck? What does the technology most align to in terms of driving efficiencies or productivity gains? And how do you leverage those gains to reinforce and build on the wins?

“You start with your low-hanging fruit.”

Early wins

English’s comments come on the back of Pronto’s latest AI roadmap announcement, which coincides with the 50th year of Pronto ERP in the A/NZ market. The announcement includes new and enhanced AI capabilities including natural language interaction, predictive inventory demand and fulfilment forecasting and voice enabled BI reporting and dashboards, across Pronto Xi. Other capabilities include machine learning predictions for service and maintenance, agentic assisted purchase order approval, automated inventory checks and stock recommendations, and intelligent B2B eCommerce agents.

English says addition of a more conversational element to getting data out of the ERP system is likely to be the biggest winner for customers near term.

“If you wanted to ask how much of a given stock item is in stock, you’d have to navigate through layers of menus. Now, there’ll be an app and you can say ‘tell me how much stock of X do I have? And it will do a live inquiry on your data and come back with an answer.”

That capability is as much about reducing friction as it is about introducing new technology.

“For your typical operational managers, it just makes finding answers quicker, which is a reduction in friction,” English says.

“The other big boon will be at the executive layer, where typically your CFOs, your CEOs, your COOs, they’re not in the system day in and day out.

“They’ll be asking a subordinate for that information. It provides a new interface to the system to surface up those answers in real time.

Another early use case courtesy of Pronto is purchase order approvals.

Today, approvals often require users to log into a system, navigate to the relevant screen and manually complete the transaction. In future, many of those interactions could be reduced to a simple response delivered through an AI-driven workflow.

“You’ll get a message saying, ‘Hey, you’ve got this PO’, and you can just respond yes, and then that goes back to actually do the mechanism of approving the order in the system without you needing to go through that step of logging in,” he says.

“That’s five minutes back in a day for a CFO per order.” Multiplied across teams, processes and departments, those efficiencies begin to add up.

“Pronto have done a great job because they’ve focused on actually getting some practical use, not just ticking a box.”

Into the future

Advances in AI-enabled ERP mean customer problems that weren’t practical or economical to solve with AI even 18 months ago are now far more realistic.

“Certainly for smaller customers, it gives access to automation that previously they would have required reasonably involved integration or automation projects to remove manual steps and change.

“Some of these AI agents and processes will enable that automation and remove that friction almost out-of-the-box.”

Longer term, the roadmap extends into agent-to-agent interactions, where systems communicate directly with customers, suppliers and other applications.

“The future vision is kind of agent-to-agent communication,” English says.

Yet despite the focus on new capabilities, he is adamant the role of ERP itself is not changing.

“ERP is still at the crux of the business. It’s still the core of business,” he says. “AI is just an augmentation to that to enable better ways of working and new ways of working.”

For organisations still trying to determine where AI belongs in their ERP strategy, English’s advice is to look beyond the hype and focus on the everyday frustrations that slow people down.

“There is a lot of hype around AI, but there are very tangible use cases where it provides  productivity enhancement. And that is real.

“We’re seeing it all over the place.”