Published on the 04/08/2026 | Written by Heather Wright

Executing an enterprise resource experience vision…

Local organisations may need to rethink and realign ERP modernisation plans as the market undergoes a ‘reimagination’ on the back of agentic AI.

New research shows the shift from traditional ERP to what is being dubbed ERX – or enterprise resource experience – is creating a new decision point for CIOs.

“This a huge reimagining of ERP and what’s really exciting is that it’s achievable.”

ERX is positioned as the next evolution of ERP. Rather than acting primarily as a system of record and workflow management platform, ERX combines AI, automation and agentic capabilities to create systems able to sense changes, support decision-making and increasingly execute processes autonomously. Gartner has forecast that by 2030 more than 50 percent of foundational ERP tasks will be autonomously executed by AI, reducing human involvement in finance, supply chain and HR.

Neha Ralhan, Gartner senior principal analyst, describes ERX as a continuum, with organisations moving at different speeds towards intelligent and autonomous enterprise operations.

She told iStart the move is not a repackaging of ERP, but a reimagination.

“It is not the system of old. It’s not the system you recognised from five years ago. It won’t be, can’t be. AI has fundamentally changed ERP.”

While traditional ERP was a passive system of record and digitised ERP layered in AI to enhance insight, ERX harnesses real-time orchestration, composable extensions, user-first experiences and native intelligence to drive faster decision velocity and continuous adaptability to volatility.

Assessing the future

For CIOs and ERP leaders, however, the immediate challenge is not adopting ERX. It’s understanding whether existing ERP strategies remain fit for purpose.

“The first thing is just to assess and audit your current ERP maturing and do this without blinkers,” Ralhan says. “Lots of organisations have spent a lot of money, and not just money but effort and resourcing and strategy, on their ERP. But to have that almost dispassionate view of where ERP stands is really important.”

The assessment extends beyond technology to vendor strategy.

“People need to evaluate vendor offerings,” she says. “You might be surprised what you find, both in terms of the audit of your ERP and also the offerings.”

Existing ERP ecosystems are increasingly misaligned with the pace and complexity of AI-driven businesses, Gartner says.

As organisations begin comparing future capabilities against their own ambitions, some may discover their current platform is no longer the best fit.

“It may not be the one. That isn’t anything that’s a reflection on the vendor or organisation. It’s just that things are moving at such a rapid pace and your ambition my not be completely aligned with what the vendor’s roadmap is and vice versa,” she warns.

When it comes to ERX, Gartner is clear – the technology is not yet fully available. Yet despite that, vendor decisions made today must be ERX-aligned.

“CIOs should prioritise partners with a credible ERX vision and architectures that support composability, open integration and AI-driven evolution,” analysts write in From ERP to ERX: The CIOs Guide to AI-Powered ERP Systems. “Those that do so will position themselves as leaders in the AI era, while those that delay will face escalating costs, reduced relevance and lost market opportunities.”

Roadmap rethink

The advice comes as many organisations continue to execute ERP transformation plans developed before the surge of interest in agentic AI.

Asked whether organisations with established ERP roadmaps should simply press on with their modernisation plans and layer ERX capabilities on later, Ralhan recommends a pause for reflection.

“Take a breath,” she says. “A lot of organisations we speak to have a gorgeous roadmap developed 19 months ago and they’ve put it on the shelf.

“What ERX also forces organisations to do is to have that roadmap as a living document. It’s not a one and done exercise.”

She warns that looking to other organisations to copy their initiatives could prove futile. “It’s really important to realise that what one organisation is doing may not be right for your organisation. It is a continuum and people will have different ambitions and different starting points. For some organisations the ambition may just be scalable ERP, but for others this is a great opportunity to move from laggard status and make a quantum leap.”

Gartner is urging organisations to reject the ‘digitisation trap’ of layering AI over fragmented or legacy business processes – something that ‘merely accelerates the production of poor outcomes and limits the ability to scale’.

“Without structural transformation, your ERP will never evolve to become an ERX and will remain an expensive liability, failing to deliver a competitive insight.”

Setting a North Star

Instead the analyst company is urging businesses to identify their North Star – defining a goal as human-centric decision intelligence. “This vision is not about total human displacement, but about removing cognitive friction by repositioning subject matter experts as supervisors of contextual intelligence, delivering intelligent automation to handle routine execution while humans focus on oversight, exception management and value-based decision making.”

Composable, event-driven technology foundations need to be architected to deliver real-time data streams, open protocols and a layered AI control plane. Business partners will need to be pulled into the mix to align strategic objectives, secure sustained funding, dismantle silos, while governance guardrails for partner and system integrator ecosystems will be needed to enforce clear configuration guardrails, open composability principles and shared performance metrics – recasting vendors and system integrators as strategic co-innovators.

Here in A/NZ the evolution is exposing weaknesses in the fragmented ERP environments many organisations have accumulated over time.

“Unfortunately, it’s sort of the ad hoc nature of ERP that a lot of organisations have, which is we’ll procure this little bit of tech here and then we’ll integrate it with this and then we’ve got a little bit of shadow ERP going as well. I think the timeline for that is numbered.

“It needs to be a little bit more strategic, which a lot of organisations in this part of the world haven’t been, either because of the legacy they’ve adopted, and also part of it is that sometimes we don’t have access to all the offerings available globally.”

There’s good news for those organisations running fragmented ERP systems with Ralhan saying they will be able to participate just as effectively, particularly for those for whom the fragmentation was done ‘mindfully’ – adding on best of breed systems – and may have greater agility now.

“Now is the time internally to set a North Star,” Ralhan says. “A lot can be achieved in a lot shorter period. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but this a huge reimagining of ERP and what’s really exciting is that it’s achievable.”