Richard Ewing was reviewing an organization where a department head had switched on an automated customer retention feature over a weekend. The agent read a support ticket, decided an important account was about to leave, and applied an unapproved 15 percent discount to a multi-year contract.
Ewing wrote it up in CIO in August, and called it a breakdown in corporate delegation and signing authority. That’s the right diagnosis. It’s also the mild version, because a discount lands on an invoice and somebody in finance eventually asks about it.
Move the same permission into planning and no invoice ever comes. Give an agent the ability to adjust a safety stock level or a lead time and it doesn’t touch a purchase requisition. It changes a number. MRP does the rest on the next run, and every requisition it generates is legitimate. Each one clears your approval workflow, because that workflow inspects requisitions.
A purchase order is a decision you approve. A planning parameter is a decision you already approved, years ago, for a person.
01The Meeting That Used to Catch This
Microsoft is retiring release waves, as ERP Today reported on 26 August. Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Dataverse have published capability on a fixed twice-yearly cycle for years, which gave anyone planning around it two scheduled moments to gather stakeholders and decide. From September 2026 the roadmap publishes continuously instead, and there’s no Release Wave 2 plan.
Microsoft says none of this changes when features actually ship. What ended is the meeting.
The review is yours to schedule now, and Microsoft’s guidance is to build a monthly or quarterly one out of saved filters and an RSS subscription. That’s a reasonable thing for a software company to say, and a strange thing to hand a plant with one IT manager and no change-control board.
02What Is Actually Arriving
Syspro put a platform called Torque into controlled availability in August. It takes approved action inside any ERP, MES or SCADA system. Autonomy is a dial, and Syspro says the dial runs from human-in-the-loop assistance to fully autonomous execution. Every action is logged with the rule it applied and the data it used, which Syspro calls the Glass House principle. Torque debuts at IMTS in Chicago this month.
Rootstock is piloting a Sales Agent and a Purchasing Agent inside its own ERP with a selected group of manufacturing customers. No manufacturer has published an outcome from either one. If someone tells you the returns are proven, they’re selling.
Salesforce is further along, and its numbers are the useful ones. In September it raised Agentforce Core from $175 to $195 per user per month and bundled in 500,000 Flex Credits, while the top tier went from 1 million credits to 2.75 million at the same $550. The goal is adoption inside the base it already has. Salesforce reports its average customer running 13 agents in April 2026, up from 5 in February 2025, against a customer base of more than 150,000.
That’s a vendor buying its way past a hesitation. Pareekh Jain, quoted in CIO’s coverage of the pricing change, made the point that a bundle can offer 60% more theoretical value and lose much of it if the bundled functionality or the credits go unused.
03This Is a Delegation Question
You already own the control for this. Most manufacturers keep a delegation of authority matrix: who can commit what, to what dollar value, without a second signature. They get reviewed when somebody is promoted, and otherwise they sit still for years.
Not one of them has a row for software.
So the question to put to your ERP vendor is which fields the agent can write. Accuracy is their problem and they’re working on it. Authority is yours, and no vendor can hand it to you.
Then ask what each of those fields sets in motion downstream, because that’s where the money is. A reorder point commits cash and sits nowhere near your spend approvals. So does a lead time, and so does a safety stock level. Change one and the commitment arrives as ordinary MRP output that every approver in the chain waves through, correctly, because each requisition is exactly what the parameter now calls for.
Most of these fields live in the item master, and the item master is usually owned by nobody in particular. The planning parameters got set during implementation, by a consultant, and most of them haven’t been looked at since. The vendor is about to hand an agent a key to that drawer.
Your existing thresholds still work here. They just have to attach to the parameter instead of the transaction. Whatever a buyer can commit without a second signature is the wrong ceiling for a field that moves weeks of inventory.
Set the autonomy dial by what the field commits, not by how confident you are in the model.
04What Not to Build
The vendors are drawing this line themselves, and the line they’re drawing is a good one.
SAP’s commerce partnership with Vercel, reported by ERP Today in September, keeps catalogs, pricing, inventory, customer accounts, orders and fulfillment inside SAP, and moves the storefront out to release on its own schedule. The storefront changes without everything behind it changing at the same time.
That split is worth copying. Whatever holds the record stays boring and slow to change. Judgment goes where a wrong answer is cheap and somebody sees it the same day.
Tirlán, the Irish farmer-owned cooperative, carved itself out of Glanbia in a nine-month program. The S/4HANA conversion itself ran under five hours. It also ran after two full test cycles and a dress rehearsal.
John Boos & Co. has been making butcher blocks since 1887, and it went at the other half of the problem. Over 150 customized applications on premises, and a CIO, Britt East, willing to say out loud that the customizations had become a tax on growth. They moved to SAP public cloud ERP fit-to-standard, taking the vendor’s process instead of rebuilding it.
Fit-to-standard cuts against how a firm like mine makes money. Every customization is billable, and every one of them is something a client maintains forever. If your ERP vendor is about to ship an agent that does the step you’d have paid someone to build, wait for the release. The work worth paying for sits between systems, where no single vendor owns both ends.
Pull your delegation of authority matrix. Which row on it covers the agent your ERP vendor switches on next quarter?