Acumatica Cloud ERP Expands Line of Industry-Specific AI Features
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way enterprises operate and make decisions, with its application to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software solutions representing a key area of innovation. Acumatica, a top cloud ERP platform, has kicked off the next generation of AI-based productivity and automation improved for processes based on your specific industry. Acumatica Reiterated its Promise to Powerful SaaS ERP Solutions for SMEs with a host of major updates revealed at its Acumatica Summit 2025 in Las Vegas.
AI Is One Way to Supercharge Your Traditional Processes
Acumatica Cloud ERP serves businesses in virtually every industry with specific editions featuring solutions for construction, distribution, manufacturing, retail, and professional services along with a more generalized General Business Edition. Its biannual release cycle R1 and R2 of every year, keep the platform in a constant state of improvement and innovation.
At the summit, Acumatica announced AI capabilities across all its industry editions, which are built to address industry-specific challenges and optimize business operations:
Distribution Edition: New pricing and catalog controls help to see inventory and pricing better; distributions exercise better control over product catalogs and pricing structures
Manufacturing Edition: Better tracking of material availability in real-time improves transparency of production processes, helping manufacturers proactively account for and resolve supply chain limitations. Using advanced planning and scheduling views, the manufacturing workflow is streamlined even further.
For Construction: Enhanced project billing pro Formas take project financial management to the next level while integrations with industry leaders in Estimation & Scheduling / Job Planning (Stack, Job Planner for Construction) transfer these savings from the field to project planning and work execution.
Retail Edition: E-commerce behemoth, Shopify, has a strategic partnership with Acumatica enabling Seamless Integration between Shopify & Acumatica platform to enable retailers to sync their inventory, orders, and customer data.
Professional Services Edition: Improved resource planning and project scheduling through integration with the Project Manager application improves productivity for service-oriented businesses.
Acumatica AI Studio & Acumatica Labs: Enabling AI Development
Besides this AI-enabled functionality embedded in the core ERP product, Acumatica also announced two new initiatives intended to encourage and facilitate AI-based application development:
Acumatica AI Studio: This low-code platform lets businesses build and extend AI capabilities within Acumatica ERP. AI Studio allows organizations to automate sophisticated workflows while upholding data privacy and security. That makes it especially useful for businesses that want tailored AI solutions without needing to have much in the way of programming skills.
Acumatica Labs —This initiative creates a customer preview program to catch and get early access to features under development so businesses can experience new capabilities and give feedback. Key developments expected in the Acumatica 2025 R1 and R2 releases include:
- Advanced kitting.
- Order orchestration
- Manufacturers’ Tesla-style shop floor kiosks
- Customer special orders
Document Templates: Professional Services Edition
Acumatica offers co-innovation with customers and leverages that to keep their solutions relevant; business needs are not abstract but should relate to business and world needs.
Competing Products: Where Does Acumatica Fit?
Industry analysts have recognized that Acumatica’s latest leaps in AI yield important value, but also note that the updates are not radically disruptive to the cloud ERP market. The new scheduling and work instruction capabilities bring Acumatica’s manufacturing ERP offering closer to competitors such as Epicor and Plex, according to principal industry analyst at Technology Evaluation Centers Predrag Jakovljevic. Meanwhile improved functionality in the Professional Services Edition provides additional armor to Acumatica when competing against platforms like Oracle NetSuite and Certain.
In keeping with offerings from industry stalwarts such as Epicor Prism, SAP Joule, and Microsoft Copilot, Acumatica AI Studio provides businesses with a low-code environment in which they can create AI-driven workflows. But Acumatica seems to lead many midmarket ERP vendors in this field, offering more options for the design of AI agents than is possible in something like Epicor Prism, which focuses on data visualization but less so on AI building.
A Real-World Response to AI and ERP
While other ERP software development vendors claim broad AI capabilities that are often unclear how they will be used, Acumatica’s AI strategy is refreshingly pragmatic. Enterprise Applications Consulting principal Joshua Greenbaum says the Acumatica effort here is business-first, rather than tech-first. While it does have some of the capabilities used in more general-purpose AI toolsets, this company focuses on solving real industry problems, instead of building generic tools and hoping to find a use case later.
The formalization of the company’s customer collaboration efforts via Acumatica Labs reinforces this pragmatic approach. This enables new functionality to be iteratively tested and adjusted in line with genuine business requirements, rather than developed on a speculative basis.
You have data until October 2023.
One of the most interesting announcements to come out of Acumatica Summit 2025 was the further integration with Shopify. This will help businesses that want to cater to both B2C and B2B customers from one platform. This integration allows retailers who use Acumatica to maintain one product catalog with separate views by customer type, addressing wholesale and direct-to-consumer customers.
According to Greenbaum, this integration enhances operational efficiency for many of the Acumatica customers who are a key component of the Shopify ecosystem. Acumatica’s partnership with a leading industry player like Shopify highlights the platform’s value proposition and makes it more enticing for businesses involved in e-commerce and retail operations.
Ergo: Provider an ERP with a view to the future for SMEs
Acumatica’s most recent updates emphasizing AI only partly convey its position of strength as a midmarket ERP provider, favoring practical use cases that enhance efficiency and automation in a variety of industries. Delivering real value to SMEs through the launch of tailored AI functionality, providing low-code tools to build AI applications via AI Studio, and enhancing co-innovation through Acumatica Labs.
Though its promise of AI capabilities alone isn’t ground-breaking in the overall ERP landscape, because Acumatica thinks about industry specific performance, its customers can have tangible, day-to-day value from these innovations. With its AR, AI, IoT and ‘VURT’-compliant stack, combined with some strategic alliances such as Shopify, Acumatica is trying to position itself as a full-featured ERP system that can adapt as businesses go through innovations.
As the company is increasingly adopting and deploying AI in its service, the 2025 R1 and R2 releases will see further improvements and look set to provide SME users with even more advanced and impactful ERP tools to help them harness AI for business growth.