SAP showed its AI finance assistants. ITOCHU first had to resolve 3,000 modifications.
At SAP's Connect finance keynote, customers described what came before the AI, ERP Today reported on 8 October.
Shusaku Harada of the Japanese trading house ITOCHU Corporation said its old system carried about 3,000 modifications, custom changes made to standard software over the years. They had to be dealt with before the AI work. ITOCHU then went straight to live use in finance: the AI proposes accounting entries from uploaded documents and staff review them. Harada reported fewer operating hours.
PwC's chief accounting officer Jill Notz described the same order. First came a move off a heavily customised SAP ECC, the older SAP system, to S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, SAP's cloud ERP; the billing assistant built with SAP came after. "We are not a SaaS company," she said.
SAP dates the accounting, revenue and project assistants to Q4 2026 or Q1 2027, early adopters first.
The report gives no cost and no duration for the clean-up. The keynote put the AI on stage; the 3,000 modifications came before it, and staff still review the entries the AI proposes.
How many modifications does your system still carry?
Sources
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