AI changed the ERP job spec. Here's how, platform by platform.
Two years ago, "AI experience" appeared on maybe one ERP brief in twenty. Now it's in most of them — usually vaguely, which is half the problem. Employers know the platforms have AI in them; they're less sure what that means they should hire for. Having watched this shift across our desks, here's our honest read.
The platforms took different routes. SAP built assistants and forecasting into Business One and made Joule central to S/4HANA. NetSuite layered intelligent matching, planning and text generation across the suite. Sage Intacct leaned into automated close and outlier detection — the unglamorous finance work where automation pays fastest. Different flavours, same consequence: the routine layer of ERP work is shrinking, and the judgement layer is growing.
What employers actually need now
Not "AI specialists". With few exceptions, ERP teams don't need machine-learning engineers — the vendors ship the models. What they need is consultants who can do three things: know which AI features exist in their platform, judge which ones suit a given business, and configure them with clean data underneath. That last part matters most. In practice, most "AI disappointments" we hear about trace back to messy item masters and duplicate customer records, not to the features themselves.
So the hiring brief changes less than the hype suggests: the fundamentals — module depth, process knowledge, communication — still carry the role. What's new is a premium on consultants who've actually switched these features on somewhere real. They exist, they're scarce, and they price accordingly across every platform we track in our salary guides.
For candidates the advice is blunt: get one AI feature-set into production, even a small one. A forecasting setup you configured is worth more in interview than any certificate. The consultants who did this early with HANA are the ones leading practices now; the pattern we see repeating is exactly that, one platform generation later.
Where's your skill set priced this year? Thirty seconds on the salary checker answers it. And if you're hiring into this shift — for SAP, NetSuite or Sage — we speak both languages, the ERP one and the recruitment one.