“Building the Future of Business, Together” was the theme of this year’s Acumatica Summit in Las Vegas last week. The event was Acumatica’s largest Summit ever, with over 3,500 attendees and 90-plus breakout sessions.
CEO John Case and Acumatica executives discussed Acumatica’s strategy for 2025, how its cloud-based ERP platform helps small and medium businesses (SMBs) improve business performance, and how “innovations like AI can be performance amplifiers that help businesses overcome real-world issues.”
Below are some key highlights from the Summit, and perspectives with how they align to SMB Group survey insights.
Evolving to an AI-first company
Acumatica touted its “pragmatic approach to AI” at last year’s Summit, but AI didn’t dominate the conversation. This year, AI has taken center stage as Acumatica ramps to an AI-first strategy.
Acumatica’s vision is to use AI to develop an ERP system that serves as a digital coworker for SMBs, embedding AI capabilities throughout its platform to help customers get things done more efficiently and make better decisions.
Chief Engineering Officer Miten Mehta described it as developing “AI that works for you,” emphasizing Acumatica’s commitment to ensuring that data is accurate, accessible, unified, secure, and private (Acumatica has pledged that it will not expose customer biz data to public LLMs), and to building an open and extensible platform that enables customers to integrate third-party applications and data.
Acumatica is using AI in three key ways:
- As an intelligent advisor that offers insights, identifies issues, and suggests actions. For instance, Acumatica introduced AI for anomaly detection in its latest product release.
- To automate workflows, such as invoice categorization, where AI can complete tasks with little or no human intervention.
- Interactive assistance, using generative AI to help users improve productivity and make better decisions through a conversational interface. As an example, Acumatica demonstrated how it uses AI to create field service summaries to close out requests—saving service reps from manually pulling together the information they need to close cases.
The company also launched two new offerings, Acumatica AI Studio and Acumatica Labs, to aid its own AI development initiatives and help partners and customers create or extend AI functionality.
Despite this more extensive scope, Acumatica continues to take a pragmatic approach to AI. Acumatica’s Chief Product Officer Ali Jani noted that projects that don’t address customers’ real-world challenges are not likely to end up in the product.
Alignment with SMB directions: Acumatica’s expanded commitment to AI meshes with increasing AI momentum among SMBs. According to SMB Group’s SMB Buying Journey Survey, the overwhelming majority of SMBs are accelerating AI investments—and most will require vendors to embed them within their solutions.
Deepening partner integrations to unify the customer experience
Partners have always been central to Acumatica’s strategy, and it continues to invest heavily in strengthening partnerships with developers to better unify data, processes, and people across core application areas.
Acumatica announced expanded partnerships with ADP, Shopify, and Bill. Each is designed to integrate core business processes, help customers streamline operations, and improve decision-making with cross-platform, real-time data.
While all vendors talk about integration, Acumatica seems to be taking it to a new level: According to Shopify’s spokesperson at the event, Acumatica’s “very deep integration sets you apart from all of your peers.”
Alignment with SMB Directions: SMB Group research indicates increasing SMB demand for robust integration capabilities. For instance:
- SMBs cited better compatibility with existing systems as the second most important reason to shortlist a business solution.
- SMBs ranked ease of integration as the third most-used metric for assessing solution performance.
- Two-thirds of SMBs said they plan to invest in improving business application integration to streamline and optimize operations.
Leveraging the cloud and industry expertise to help SMBs scale and grow
Acumatica highlighted how its software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and industry focus help customers to scale their operations as they grow.
Because Acumatica was developed as a cloud-native platform, customers can take advantage of new technologies and features as they become available—including dozens of native integrations and AI capabilities that it incorporates into its solutions.
Acumatica introduced new AI functionality for each of its industry editions. These capabilities are intended to help customers evolve their ERP platforms from back-office transactional systems to strategic organizational centers.
For example, Acumatica has:
- Added price and catalog controls to the Distribution Edition.
- Introduced real-time material availability for open production and advanced planning and scheduling views in the Manufacturing Edition.
- Integrates Project Manager for resource planning and project scheduling into the Professional Services Edition.
- Added pro forma project billing enhancements and enhanced partnerships with Stack and JobPlanner in Construction.
- Integrated Shopify’s e-commerce platform with the Retail Edition.
Alignment with SMB directions: SMBs will continue to shift their workloads to cloud computing and as-a-service solutions. 80% or more of SMBs say they are very or somewhat likely to choose cloud or SaaS solutions for financial management, sales/marketing, human resources, and other key applications to leverage the resources and innovation they need to grow.
Doubling down on a customer-focused, community-centric approach
Acumatica emphasized its commitment to learning, solving problems, and co-creating with its customers and partners. Acumatica has poured a lot of energy into building community, online and in real life,. For example:
- With established user groups across North America, Acumatica is now focusing on adding international groups. Each group is managed by an Acumatica customer and an employee, and focuses on issues most relevant to their geography.
- Acumatica and its partners also host many customer events worldwide.
- Employees across Acumatica visit customers regularly to better understand their product requirements.
- Acumatica’s Community site, launched in 2020, has more than 30K users, who sparked 580 new ideas in 2024. Acumatica has added over 240 features based on ideas generated on the site.
Alignment with SMB directions: SMBs want vendors to move beyond transactional interactions to a consultative approach that better aligns solutions to their challenges and objectives. For instance, SMBs’ top requests for how vendors can improve the tech purchasing experience include: doing a better job of explaining how solutions meet specific business goals, and spending more time understanding their requirements. Personalization also matters post-implementation, where many SMBs want easier access to support, dedicated account managers, better training options, and regular check-ins/feedback sessions.
Perspective
Acumcatica’s 2025 Summit showcased the company’s newly invigorated approach to AI and innovation—while holding true to its commitment to helping SMBs grow. Combined with its continued investment in industry-specific capabilities, and seamless integrations with partners like ADP, Shopify, and Bill, Acumatica underscored its clear focus on empowering businesses with real-time, actionable data they need to support growth.
Acumatica’s dedication to understanding and responding to the evolving needs of SMBs is just as important. The vendor’s track record of listening to customers and fostering community-driven innovation will help ensure that its technology investments match with what customers need to succeed.
With its AI-first approach, enhanced integrations, and authentic focus on customer success, Acumatica’s strategic direction is aligned not just with industry trends, but also with the specific requirements of SMBs—boding well for its continued growth in the SMB market.
© SMB Group 2025