Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: May 8, 2025
What is Covered in this Article:
- Epicor introduced agentic AI capabilities within Epicor Prism at their annual Insights conference in Las Vegas. These capabilities streamline supply chain processes across finance, production, customer service, and operations.
- Prism AI agents are embedded in the Epicor Industry ERP Cloud suite, targeting manufacturing, distribution, and retail industries, aiming to simplify tasks and provide guidance within ERP functions.
- Epicor also launched Carbon Cost Rollup in Kinetic ERP, aiding organizations in assigning monetary values to carbon output for ESG compliance and sustainability reporting.
- Epicor highlighted its deep domain expertise, integration of predictive AI (Epicor Grow AI), and generative AI (Epicor Prism), emphasizing a customer-first approach with flexible deployment and pricing models.
The Event – Major Themes & Vendor Moves: Epicor announced the general availability of agentic AI capabilities within Epicor Prism, the company’s generative AI platform, at its annual Insights user conference in Las Vegas. These newly available agentic features can handle a variety of supply chain processes, including finance, production, customer service, and operations processes. The agents are embedded directly into the Epicor Industry ERP Cloud suite, specifically tailored for manufacturing, distribution, and retail organizations.
Prism AI agents are designed to remove friction from common supply-chain tasks, making it easier to accomplish specific actions or workflows with less human effort. Agents are also available to guide users when navigating functions within the ERP, such as creating purchase orders or handling accounting issues. At present, Epicor is offering a base amount of generative AI usage at no additional cost, making it easy for customers to try out agentic workflows. Epicor will likely shift organizations to a consumption-based pricing model as AI usage ramps up.
Epicor also introduced Carbon Cost Rollup, a carbon-accounting tool embedded in Kinetic, the company’s manufacturing-focused ERP. This tool enables organizations to assign monetary values to their carbon output, simplifying ESG emissions compliance and sustainability reporting.
Finally, Epicor noted that Epicor Grow AI is now generally available. Grow AI is a predictive AI modeling engine that runs on the Grow Data Platform and can act upon ERP, legacy, and third-party data to deliver business insights.
Epicor Insights: Epicor Unveils Agentic AI to Drive Supply Chain Efficiency
Analyst Take: Epicor used its annual Insights customer event to reinforce several key messages, largely around highlighting the factors that differentiate it from competitors, the company’s focus on providing deep domain expertise that underpins its platform, the inclusion of both predictive artificial intelligence and generative AI, and its customer-first approach to delivering value across its software, deployment options, and pricing models.
Deep Domain Expertise Underpinning the Platform
One key aspect that differentiates Epicor’s ERP platform from many competitors is the deep domain expertise built into the platform. This expertise around business rules, forms, workflows, and data structures delivers significant out-of-the-box functionality tailored to customers’ needs, even companies operating in niche sub-verticals. This sub-vertical focus accelerates implementations by embedding best practices, core workflows, and data structures, which helps to reduce the need for costly aftermarket customizations.
Predictive Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI
Epicor is taking an interesting approach to AI, highlighting the infusion of predictive analytics and generative AI into its ERP suite. The company’s branded Epicor Grow AI’s predictive capabilities leverage historical data, advanced statistical models, and machine learning to forecast demand, optimize inventory levels, and simulate “what-if” scenarios across supply chain and financial operations.
Meanwhile, Epicor Prism brings agentic, generative AI directly into the ERP interface, using pretrained large language models enhanced with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to safely generate actionable insights from proprietary data while reducing the possibility of hallucination.
By blending these AI approaches, Epicor is positioning its ERP as a catalyst for delivering real-time insights and action instead of simply serving as a system of record. In the near future, Epicor will need to ensure that its generative AI tools can query and drive actions through natural language prompts or assistants to remain on par with its competitors.
Customer-First Approach: Software, Deployment, and Pricing
Epicor’s customer-first philosophy is evident in its flexible software delivery, deployment options, and pricing models. Epicor has realized that a modern, role-based, browser-based UI with drag-and-drop personalization, embedded dashboards, and mobile-friendly screens is table stakes, as is the ability to tailor screens, alerts, and automations through configurators, rather than code.
Another key aspect of Epicor’s customer-friendly approach is its continued support of on-premise ERP functionality. While the company is using a carrot-and-stick approach to encourage customers to migrate to the cloud (by reserving the AI functionality for SaaS users only), Epicor’s acknowledgement that some customers simply are not ready – or likely won’t ever be ready – to shift to the cloud, will help them attract businesses that feel abandoned by cloud-only ERP vendors.
Epicor is also rolling out Ascend, a program designed to help customers upgrade to the cloud. It is built on a preexisting program called Upgrade to Cloud, but adds additional AI functionality delivered through Prism to help customers build cloud-friendly configurations without traditional coding. The program also provides more visibility into the customizations currently used in their current systems and provides insights to help them understand which features, workflows, or other customizations need to be migrated.
Finally, Epicor’s generative AI pricing reflects the reality that many customers are not quite ready to deploy AI across a wide range of workflows or processes. Epicor offers a platform fee for customers with two pricing options: a pre-paid consumption of a certain amount of generative AI use, or a pay-as-you-go consumption model. The pre-pay option provides predictability, while the consumption model enables organizations to closely link the cost of AI with specific actions or tasks. Ultimately, the goal is to provide a transparent and scalable pricing model that helps customers understand and manage their AI-related costs while delivering tangible value through increased productivity and efficiency.
Challenges Ahead
Epicor must still address several challenges to drive new logo acquisitions and keep existing customers happy. Prism currently doesn’t allow users to design their own AI capabilities, making the platform less configurable than other larger SaaS ERP vendor offerings.
Epicor’s multi-instance, on-prem, and SaaS-based model may introduce data consistency and integration hurdles, which could deter customers who want faster, simpler lift-and-shift transitions to a subscription-only model.
Furthermore, Epicor must continually invest to meet soaring demands for AI-driven automation, placing it in direct competition with much larger ERP vendors. Falling behind on either innovation or—perhaps even more importantly—security risks may result in ceding ground to competitors that position AI and trust as core value propositions.
Finally, external pressures—most recently tariffs, volatile raw-material costs, global supply chain constraints, and the spectre of economic headwinds—are forcing Epicor’s prospects and customers to tighten IT budgets or postpone ERP upgrades. As such, Epicor must balance affordability and ROI-driven feature releases to help customers navigate this uncertainty without overloading them with cost or complexity.
What to Watch:
- Expect Epicor to enhance Prism’s capabilities by allowing users to build and tailor their AI workflows, improving flexibility and competitiveness with larger ERP vendors.
- Look for continued investment in programs like Ascend, which use AI-driven tools to streamline configuration and customization and ease customer transitions from on-premise to cloud.
- As AI adoption grows, Epicor will likely refine its consumption-based pricing model to balance transparency, scalability, and affordability for customers integrating AI into core processes.
You can read the full press release at the company’s website.
Disclosure: Futurum is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum as a whole.
Other insights from Futurum:
Leveraging Epicor’s Grow Data Platform for Better Insights and Improved CX
Enterprising Insights, Episode 30 – Predictions at the Halfway Point of 2024
Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
