AI agents are moving into the ERP. Who governs them?

ERP & Project Management Weekly · 26 October – 1 November 2026

A busy week: SAP TechEd, NetSuite SuiteWorld and monday.com Elevate all landed in the same days, and they carried one message. Artificial intelligence is no longer an assistant that answers questions. It is becoming an agent that does work inside the ERP and the project tools.

For an SME the news is not that agents are coming. It is that they come with a new cost model, with responsibilities that are still unclear and, from 9 December, inside a legal framework that treats software as a product in every sense.

SAP: Joule moves from answering to executing

At TechEd on 27 October SAP presented the next generation of Joule. Agents can launch multi-step workflows, pull data from external systems through the open MCP and Agent2Agent protocols, and work together with agents built by customers.

The most interesting part is not capability but control:

• an Enterprise AI Gateway centralises authentication, policy, monitoring and audit of everything agents do;
• a Governance Agent is designed to support compliance with the EU AI Act;
• agents can call deterministic workflows (n8n through Joule Studio) when an exact, repeatable sequence of steps is needed, as in regulated processes.

As Ted Way, SAP's chief product officer for business AI, put it: "Open protocols need governed doors."

What it means for an SME. The gateway and the knowledge graph are expected to reach general availability in the first quarter of 2027, and the coverage so far gives no pricing or licensing details. Companies on SAP today have time to prepare the ground: who can do what, with which data, and who answers for the outcome.

Oracle NetSuite: implementations "in weeks or days"

At SuiteWorld (Las Vegas, 25–28 October) NetSuite presented SuiteExpress, an implementation method in which AI captures requirements, maps the solution, migrates data and tests workflows while the consultant supervises. Oracle talks about timelines cut to weeks or days.

Three caveats:

• for now it applies only to software-industry companies in the United States and Canada;
• several features shown on stage as available are listed in the official press release as "future release";
• the claim that agents and AI tools come at no extra cost was made in the keynote, but the documentation confirms it only for part of the services.

What it means for an SME. The idea is right: long implementations ask too much of customers before they deliver value. But the speed of an ERP project depends on data quality and process clarity, not just on the tool. And commercial commitments belong in writing.

Work management: agents arrive with a meter

On the project-tool side the week was just as busy:

• monday.com showed at Elevate agents that track deadlines, check people's availability and manage handoffs. Pricing is credit-based: ten agents running one task a day for twenty working days cost roughly 200–250 dollars a month, according to monday.com's own estimates.
• Atlassian lets users launch a coding agent from Rovo directly on a Jira ticket, with the result written back to the ticket.
• Notion moves Business and Enterprise plans to a new AI credit system from 2 November.
• Wrike stopped counting simple actions, such as status changes, against AI credit usage.

What it means for an SME. The cost of work tools becomes variable. A per-user licence is budgeted once a year; credit-based consumption has to be monitored every month, with thresholds and owners.

Regulation: software becomes a "product"

By 9 November the Italian government must adopt the decree transposing EU Directive 2024/2853 on liability for defective products. The key change: the definition of product now includes software. If a defective software component causes damage, including the loss of personal data, the damage can be compensated, data recovery costs included.

The new rules apply to products placed on the market from 9 December 2026.

What it means for an SME. It concerns software developers, but also anyone who customises and integrates ERP systems for clients. It adds to the Cyber Resilience Act: version documentation, vulnerability handling and change traceability become legal protection, not just good practice.

The common thread

Every major vendor is selling agents. Few explain clearly who is accountable when an agent gets it wrong.

A Nielsen survey of 1,701 senior leaders, cited at Elevate, found that 46% worry about losing control of what agents do. And Christopher Richardson of the Project Management Institute put it simply: "AI can accelerate the work, but it cannot own the work."

For an SME the right question is not which agent to buy, but how to govern it:

• Permissions: which data and functions the agent can reach, and with which role.
• Traceability: every action logged, readable and verifiable.
• Accountability: a person who answers for the result.
• Costs: consumption thresholds and someone who watches them.

It is the same work you would do for a new team member. The difference is that an agent works faster, and so it makes mistakes faster.

Sources

• CIO – SAP wants Joule to run business workflows, not just answer questions
• SiliconANGLE – SAP advances its autonomous enterprise push with smarter, governed Joule agents
• PR Newswire – NetSuite introduces SuiteExpress
• BrokenRubik – SuiteWorld 2026 announcements
• UC Today – monday.com AI agents face their biggest test at Elevate NYC
• UC Today – Work management news: October's AI giants have to show their work
• Il Sole 24 Ore – Defective products: shorter deadlines and greater consumer protection in December

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Lucsartech supports Italian SMEs on ERP, infrastructure and compliance. If you are evaluating AI agents in your ERP and want to understand how to govern them, get in touch.