Enterprise Month in Review - event detox and AI agent reality check edition

About ready for an event detox? Need a break from agentic keynote overdose? Join us for our picks and pans of the month, and perhaps a surprise guest or two, as we valiantly push to break through the noise and boil down our top road lessons. As always, Brian's infamous slide deck will be on display. Bring your savviest and snarkiest commentary...

What is the state of SAP in April 2026? The markets have one take - but is that the whole story? What if we frame this in terms of customer priorities and value instead? And how does the enterprise AI story factor in - with the "garbage in, garbage out" data issue firmly in mind? That's plenty of fodder for our first air-it-out 'State of SAP' review in six months. (Though there is also our live ASUG Talks sessions with live customer Q/As since then). This podcast begins differently - Jon Reed had an opening ventilation in store for Geoff Scott and Josh Greenbaum to riff on. From there, we follow on our unscripted way, into SAP's AI strategy - and what individuals (and customers) should do in the face of global volatility and tech disruption. Along the way, we address two of SAP's major news items as well: the Reltio acquisition, and Thomas Saueressig's move into Chief Customer Officer on the SAP Executive Board. This podcast is intended to set the stage for SAP Sapphire Orlando and the co-located ASUG Annual Conference, where will we be taping live again.

When you issue research that says things like this, you have my attention: "Instead of simplifying, many organizations are doubling down on complexity in the name of AI. This is where the story takes a turn. AI has become the top priority for modernizing customer service, but it's also exposing just how broken the underlying data layer really is." Rebecca Wettemann of Valoir released fresh CX research that laid out the siloed predicaments CX (and contact center) teams are facing. But what should enterprises do about it? And why do we keep pursuing sexy AI solutions that won't get results - until we deal with the underlying data/people/silo problems? At Oracle AI World New York City, I hashed out these issues with Wettemann live during an event pit stop. (We also recorded a halftime recap of the Oracle AI event and agentic apps news, which was released as a separate podcast). Note: you can see the Valoir CX research summary/reveal on diginomica: https://diginomica.com/pursuit-customer-holy-grail-why-organisations-must-finally-tackle-cost-dis-connected-cx).

Halfway through Oracle's AI World Tour in New York City, Jon Reed caught up with Rebecca Wettemann of Valoir to recap the highlights of what we heard so far. After discussing Valoir's new CX research - released as a separate podcast - we dig into Oracle's enterprise AI play, which is a bit of a neglected media story, lacking the sensational appeal of the market news Oracle has been in the middle of. We also discuss where Oracle CX goes from here, and what to make of Oracle's 22 new agentic apps - news which dropped a week before this event. Note: Jon will release deeper analysis of this event on diginomica, after his 1:1 interviews were completed.

After a vigorous first day at the 2026 Sage analyst event, Brian Sommer and Jon Reed hash out an ERP vendor with a provocative approach to AI for finance. Why has Sage advanced the conversation with domain-specific finance models? What did the customers on-site say about AI adoption/disruption? Is there a compelling future for ERP beyond a simplistic image of agentic prompts? What open questions does Sage need to tackle at their upcoming Sage Future user event in late April? Note: due to saving Sage's news previews for Sage Future, this podcast focused on hot issues rather than state-of-the-company details. Those will be revealed/updated in a month's time at the user event.

Esteban Kolksy, Chief Distiller at Constellation Research, closed out the CRM Playas IRL (In Real Life) event in Atlanta with a provocative keynote the debunked enterprise AI myths, while making a case for where the value in AI truly lies. After Kolsky left the stage, we broke down his main points on why LLMs are becoming commodities, and why proper enterprise AI is superior to out-of-the-box frontier models. Is AI "intelligent" - or a fascimle of intelligence - and why does this matter? We argued, at times, before landing on why Kolsky hates context graphs, and why I believe the misuse of the word "grounding" holds us back. This keynote was worth hashing out: there are big takeaways for customers that want to avoid lock-in, and to accomplish something better with AI by making AI a strategic part of infrastructure, rather than a not-very-smart chatbot.

Yep, we're back. It's time to join us for our unscripted review of the enterprise year to date. We also have special guest Andreas Welsch on tap, for an agentic AI enterprise gut check, timed with the Wednesday, February 25th announcement of his new book, The HUMAN Agentic AI Edge. As always, the audience brought their savviest and snarkiest comments. Note: to check Brian's infamous slide deck, go to the live video replay at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yGo9a01lPA&t=3s.

After two full days at ZohoDay 2026, Jon Reed and Thomas Wieberneit quickly regrouped for some first impressions on the slew of news and potent topics, such as intelligence as a commodity, the tension between custom solutions and technical debt, advances in AI coding that impact Zoho's own development teams, and reactions from customers on site.

ZohoDay 2026 is in the books. But while the assembled mass of industry analysts were still in Austin, Jon Reed and Brian Sommer grabbed a quiet room for an unscripted recap. There was a flurry of news at this show to make sense of, some of it NDA but most of it not. The guys were on the clock this time, with only 25 minutes to hit on the hottest issues from customers, partners, and Zoho leadership - not to mention Zoho fleshing out the "Zoho ERP" news. Brian had his infamous hand-scrawled notepad on the state of Zoho, and Jon walked listeners through Zoho's take on the changing risks of SaaS in the AI era. (This podcast was taped prior to Jon's last AI deep dives with Zoho in Austin, but there was plenty of AI content to discuss regardless). As always, catch Jon and Brian's recaps on diginomica.com for more background as they appear...

During their Acumatica Summit podcast review, Jon Reed and Brian Sommer went off into a full-blown treatment of ERP versus AI agent disruptions. Sommer managed to expertly nudge Reed into blowing a gasket over LinkedIn AI exuberance, so we decided to release this back and forth as a separate 15 minute podcast (you can also hear the full Acumatica Summit review as a separate podcast). *** This debate is not intended as a complete coverage of this topic, just as a flavor for the issues ERP vendors and their customers are facing ***. Though this discussion references Acumatica, it's about the ERP market as a whole, and there is a contrast made between ERP vendors with legacy install bases and those with more flexible/real-time systems - without that older install base. Discussions where things run hot are fun, but for a more complete review of this topic, track Reed and Sommer's ongoing articles on diginomica.com.