ISG Software Research Analyst Perspectives

Payment Technology is Transforming Treasury and Finance Operations

Posted by Robert Kugel on 22 September 2026

Finance has been a hotbed of technology adaptation, especially in the digital age, because money is just numbers and therefore easily lends itself to new types of digital innovation. For centuries, fortunes were found in removing friction from financial transactions. For example, starting in ancient times, coins were minted to reduce the need for weighing metal in every transaction, along with... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, ERP and Continuous Accounting, blockchain, digital finance, Procure-to-Pay, Consolidate and Close Management, Treasury, Order-to-Cash, Payments, Stablecoins

AI Imperatives for Business Software Providers

Posted by Robert Kugel on 12 August 2026

I recently wrote about the distinction between personal productivity artificial intelligence (AI) and enterprise AI. Each has a role to play. An important challenge facing enterprises in the coming years will be encouraging and supporting the use of AI-enabled personal productivity applications for individuals and small workgroups while preventing their misuse in performing enterprise tasks and... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, Supply Chain Planning, Business Planning, Enterprise Resource Planning, ERP and Continuous Accounting, supply chain management, digital finance, Procure-to-Pay, Consolidate and Close Management, Order-to-Cash, AI & Machine Learning, Buyer Behavior, AI Governance

Oracle Fusion Agentic Apps May Address AI Cost and Control Issues

Posted by Robert Kugel on 30 July 2026

Oracle’s recent announcements around Fusion Agentic Applications represent a meaningful evolution in enterprise application architecture, especially as it facilitates automation and, ultimately, process transformation. Rather than following a prevailing view that assumes agentic systems must capture the nuances of every business process top-down, which would be prohibitively expensive and... Read More

Topics: Governance, Office of Finance, Business Planning, ERP and Continuous Accounting, digital finance, Procure-to-Pay, Consolidate and Close Management, Customers and CX - Business & Technologies, Employees & HCM - Business & Technologies, Order-to-Cash, Office of Revenue - Business Technologies, AI & Machine Learning, Supply Chain & Operations

More on the SaaS-Pocalypse That Won’t Happen

Posted by Robert Kugel on 16 July 2026

The “SaaS-Pocalypse,” which I commented on earlier this year, is a persistent yet cresting technology and Wall Street analyst narrative that rests on three flawed assumptions. First, advanced AI assistants and autonomous agents will make traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise applications and their business models obsolete. Second, AI will allow ordinary workers to vibe code custom... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, Business Planning, ERP and Continuous Accounting, digital finance, Procure-to-Pay, Consolidate and Close Management, Order-to-Cash

You Can’t Spell ERP Without AI

Posted by Robert Kugel on 15 January 2026

The reason why artificial intelligence (AI) has been the focus of endless keynote speeches, product roadmap announcements by ERP providers and development efforts across all categories of business software is that AI-embedded systems promise (and will ultimately deliver) software that more closely molds its operation to the needs of a specific enterprise and individual user. The technology is... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, ERP and Continuous Accounting, digital finance, Generative AI, Order-to-Cash, Business & Technologies, AI & Machine Learning

Tokenizing Working Capital to Improve Performance and Efficiency

Posted by Robert Kugel on 13 November 2025

Tokenization is an emerging topic for business software providers. Tokenization is the process of representing something valuable or complex with a simple computer-readable substitute to enhance security or improve the efficiency and usability of a system. Tokens are already widely used in commerce. It’s now common for sensitive data used in a transaction, such as a bank account number or credit... Read More

Topics: Governance, Office of Finance, Operations, Analytics, ERP and Continuous Accounting, digital finance, Procure-to-Pay, Generative AI, AI and Machine Learning, Order-to-Cash, Business & Technologies

NetSuite Next: Productivity by a Thousand Cuts with AI

Posted by Robert Kugel on 28 October 2025

Oracle NetSuite’s presentations and announcements at its recent user group meeting, SuiteWorld, focused on an initiative called NetSuite Next, a set of artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI capabilities that will be an inherent part of the NetSuite suite of applications starting in 2026. The company’s objective is to facilitate customers’ transition to this AI-centric... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, Business Planning, Digital Commerce, ERP and Continuous Accounting, digital finance, Procure-to-Pay, Generative AI, Order-to-Cash, Business & Technologies, AI & Machine Learning

Data Is the Structural Steel of Finance Departments

Posted by Robert Kugel on 15 October 2025

There's a saying among military historians that amateurs debate strategy while professionals talk about logistics. In a similar vein, those rooted deeply in the workings of information technology (IT) pay close attention to data because it is fundamental to the proficiency and effectiveness of any IT system. Visionaries speak of data being the oil or gold of the information economy; practitioners... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, Business Planning, ERP and Continuous Accounting, Procure-to-Pay, Generative AI, Consolidate and Close Management, AI and Machine Learning, Order-to-Cash, Business & Technologies

Use AI and Technology to Optimize Working Capital

Posted by Robert Kugel on 03 September 2025

Working capital includes current assets (short-term items such as cash, money due from customers and inventory) and current liabilities (typically payments due to suppliers and loan amounts that must be repaid within one year). Working capital management is a prime function of the finance organization, designed to balance often-conflicting objectives related to revenue, liquidity, risk and... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, ERP and Continuous Accounting, Procure-to-Pay, Order-to-Cash, Business & Technologies

Successful AI Adoption: Change Management is Essential

Posted by Robert Kugel on 07 August 2025

Organizational change management is the discipline and process of guiding individuals, teams and organizations to a desired future structure. This is frequently an issue when implementing new technology designed to enable new strategies or business models. It is often a challenge because of human resistance to change, which is driven by a desire for stability, fear of personal consequences and... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, Business Planning, ERP and Continuous Accounting, AI, Procure-to-Pay, Consolidate and Close Management, AI & Technologies, Order-to-Cash, Business & Technologies

Payments Technology and Evolution of P2P and O2C

Posted by Robert Kugel on 05 August 2025

At its heart, money is an intellectual construct, as demonstrated through its continual shape-shifting over the ages. Since most money today exists in digital form, technology has an outsized impact on advancing innovations, especially in the most mundane corners of finance. Payments—the transmission and receipt of money in commercial transactions—have been an especially fertile area for... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, ERP and Continuous Accounting, Procure-to-Pay, Order-to-Cash, Business & Technologies

Sage Defines its Future in AI for ERP

Posted by Robert Kugel on 24 July 2025

Sage recently held its Future user conference in Atlanta. Our ISG Buyers Guide for Midsize ERP Financial Management (2024) rated Sage Intacct as one of the top three providers, reflecting its strong performance in both product capabilities and customer experience. The event showcased its advances and roadmap aimed at embedding artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI in... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, ERP and Continuous Accounting, digital finance, Procure-to-Pay, Order-to-Cash, Business & Technologies

Oracle’s AI Agents Amplify Value for Finance

Posted by Robert Kugel on 26 June 2025

Oracle’s recent industry analyst summit demonstrated significant progress in embedding artificial intelligence in its business applications—including those for finance, HR and supply chain management. This amplifies the already broad and deep functionality developed over decades. Oracle also continues to expand and extend its collaborative efforts with financial institutions, a form of... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, ERP and Continuous Accounting, digital finance, Procure-to-Pay, Consolidate and Close Management, Order-to-Cash

Generative Automation: An Alternative for Process Optimization

Posted by Robert Kugel on 05 November 2024

Agents are all the rage—and for a good reason. They are a way to automate work almost effortlessly so that repetitive and boring tasks get done with the least amount of effort on the part of the operator. In business, agents can be a boon for customer satisfaction and a way to improve worker productivity. They are alluring, with an almost unlimited number of potential use cases. However, as... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, Business Planning, ERP and Continuous Accounting, natural language processing, AI and Machine Learning, Digital Applications, Order-to-Cash

Technology Transforms ERP for a More Effective Finance Department

Posted by Robert Kugel on 20 August 2024

ERP systems have been the central nervous system of enterprises for more than three decades, handling business-critical process management and recordkeeping. While their basic outlines are unchanged, today’s systems are far more capable in their functional depth, adaptability, usability and manageability. Especially for cloud-based systems, they are far easier to maintain. Decades of refinement... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, ERP and Continuous Accounting, Order-to-Cash

Gain Finance Department Productivity with Straight-Through Processing

Posted by Robert Kugel on 13 August 2024

Improving data management is at the forefront of my Office of Finance research practice because, when not managed well, it can have a profoundly negative impact on departmental efficiency, individual performance, organizational agility and sustainability. Conversely, straight-through processing (STP), a business process design and data management methodology, reduces process friction throughout... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, ERP and Continuous Accounting, Order-to-Cash

Competitive Innovation is Improving the Economics of GenAI

Posted by Robert Kugel on 09 August 2024

At this stage of the development of Generative AI, there’s much we can see clearly (at least we think we can), but there’s even more likely to surprise us. As that great 20th-century philosopher and hall-of-fame catcher, Yogi Berra, famously said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” The breadth and speed of innovation today in all aspects of GenAI rivals that of the... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, ERP and Continuous Accounting, Model Building and Large Language Models, Order-to-Cash

Oracle Demonstrates Embedded AI for Productivity Gains

Posted by Robert Kugel on 21 May 2024

Oracle held an industry analyst summit recently where the focus was on artificial intelligence (AI) and embedded AI. At the event, Oracle demonstrated progress in adding useful AI-enabled capabilities to its business applications, especially in finance and accounting, supply chain, HR and revenue management. To put this into context, across the software industry, AI is already at work in many... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, Analytics, Business Planning, ERP and Continuous Accounting, AI and Machine Learning, Order-to-Cash

Automation Addresses VAT Tax Challenges

Posted by Robert Kugel on 16 May 2024

Value-added tax is a consumption tax levied at every point in a supply chain—from production to final sale. It’s based on the difference between the cost of production and the selling price of a product or service, or the value added. Sales taxes are different in that they are generally collected only at the final point of sale to the ultimate consumer. Enterprises collect the value-added tax... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, Tax, tax compliance, VAT, Order-to-Cash, Value-Added Tax, Sales Tax

The CFO AI Trilemma: Cut Costs, Accomplish More or Both

Posted by Robert Kugel on 13 May 2024

We’re quickly approaching the moment when it becomes clear that artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) will not be free. As that happens, we will discover who’s willing to pay how much and for what. After nearly 18 months of unlimited use-case fantasizing, it should be obvious that not all the potential applications of AI can be realized over the next three to five years because... Read More

Topics: Office of Finance, Analytics, Business Planning, ERP and Continuous Accounting, Order-to-Cash