How Agentic AI Is Rewriting ERP Workflows

00:00:01 Mark Smith 
Welcome to the Power Platform Show.Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now, let's get on with the show. Welcome back to the Power Platform Show. I am here with a longtime guest, as he's been many times on the show. Christian, welcome.

00:00:31 Christian Segurado
Thank you so much. Great being here again and hopefully adding value to the audience and having a good chat with you.

00:00:37 Mark Smith
Absolutely, absolutely. Always like to hear your ideas on ERP Dynamics 365 and particularly the topic of the last three years, AI.

00:00:49 Christian Segurado
Yeah, I mean, a lot of things changed, but it's exciting involvement. Also just coming back from MEP Summit, even more excited about what's to come, right? And it's actually nice to see that from just the theory and the vision, also the clientele is jumping on the train and is, seeing, doing tactical implementations and seeing business value.

00:01:12 Mark Smith
So nice.

00:01:13 Christian Segurado
Very excited about what's to come here.

00:01:15 Mark Smith
So what have you been up to in the last year and what's your focus for 2026?

00:01:20 Christian Segurado
Good question. Very much focused around ERP, MCP Server, Copilot Studio, Azure Foundry, and enabling our current customer base for agentic experiences, right? I mean, there's a lot of, if you think about a house, there's a lot of, foundational pieces that need to come together to actually unlock that agentic value. Talking about data, we are having a lot of customers that go to Fabric Journey with Medallion Architecture to make sure that, you know, we have really good cleanse, transformed data definitions that then can be used in those authentic experiences. That's one part. It's I was or my team is very much focused on. Then also people, right? It's not just technology, it's people aspect. Yeah. Speaking a lot about conferences, sharing blogs about how to leverage out-of-the-box capabilities around Copilot, Copilot Studio and agents around ERP. primarily supplier communications agent. We had a lot of speaking sessions around that and implemented it with our customer base to, luckily I'm not a dad yet, I know you are, but give the kid a little bit sugar and hopefully, you know, it's becoming addictive. And then also from there, how we can advance it farther. for those customer agentic scenarios, building also IP and product around that, specifically around commerce scenarios. So yeah, that is really much what I was focused around, AI from a people technology process standpoint. And I guess that there was a second part of the question, what I'm looking forward to the year, what is also pretty much focused around agentic experiences, more about multi-model, multi-agent, right? Now that we have different models that we can leverage, even a copilot studio, and how that nested agentic experience could look like. I was actually having a really interesting conversation yesterday with a friend of mine who has a healthcare startup, and his whole business idea and what he and his team built is around multi-agent, multi-modal orchestration and healthcare tech. And I'm very excited about that part. That's really what I want to focus in the next 12 months.

00:03:41 Mark Smith
So what are you seeing right now from the agent experience inside ERP? What are the use cases people are doing with it? And are they getting serious value out of it? Or is the time to configure, activate at the moment disproportionately high to the value being received?

00:03:59 Christian Segurado
I don't think the value in implementing versus the value that they're getting out of it. It's more about operational risk as well at this point, right? I mean, which examples do you want to leverage when there's still hallucination, right? It's not, it's probabilistic, not deterministic. But a couple of scenarios that we recently have implemented is around engineering change order management. As you are familiar with it in Dynamics, hopefully I'm getting in trouble, but it is very cumbersome to navigate. to do an engineering change order request, firm it, and do all the changes. It requires 10 different forms, a bunch of different clicks. What we built here is an agentic scenario that we are natural language. It's doing it for you, navigating those forms, adjusting the bill of material when the engineering change order request is approved, and so on. So that is 1 scenario that we just unlocked. We have one around sales orders and retail around customer follow-up. So depending on which store you check out. If it's a retail brick and mortar or an e-commerce experience, or if I live in New York, right? So if I'm buying here around the corner, there will be maybe, and I buy no party hat, I just make it up because I like having a good time. So maybe I get a personalized follow-up into, hey, there's like a, you know, a block party, you know, next weekend sponsored by, you know, X by Segarado Industries. So that personalized follow-up could also be, it's also something that we explore with a customer of ours. So those are maybe 2 tactical use cases that we are working on.

00:05:39 Mark Smith
So are you seeing ERP being obstructed away from the day-to-day users of it? And like is the messaging, the agentic experience lighting up inside Teams as an example? Or are they got a special copilot that they go to just for ERP land?

00:05:58 Christian Segurado
Very good question. Where we're deploying is on Teams, right? We're doing Copilot Studio agents primarily and deploying that on Teams where it's accessible, right, via that channel. If you ask me about the future of ERP, and I, you know, you know me from the last couple of attendances, I go extreme because I, if what I see is an ERP being actually more the layer on the back where, you know, the agent inquires knowledge reports back and triggers action. So I do think it will fundamental change how we interact with the ERP. It still needs to be having enforced rules because again, we have accounting standards and all those things, right? But that will be more, if you think about at the moment, data logic in the UI, I can see the future as the ERP being the lowest layer with the embedded logic and then an agentic layer to interact with it instead of the UI, because it's more efficient to retrieve data from different tables, forms, and so on, and trigger actions. So this is really where I see the ERP space going. And at the moment, the experiences are lit up primarily in channels like Teams, where the collaboration happens.

00:07:17 Mark Smith
Is there anywhere else besides Teams that it gets lit up? Because I mean, Teams is obviously for a Microsoft shop, the logical place. I mean, that's the comms platform.

00:07:25 Christian Segurado
Very good question. I mean, also SharePoint and other, you know, Microsoft, I guess, channels, and we have deployed it too. Some of the ages we deployed it also to a third-party website, right? It was more an external scenario. But a lot of our focus is around that internal productivity, around ERP, and where that productivity happens is in Teams.

00:07:50 Mark Smith
Yeah. a few years ago I was working closely with the SAP teams and SAP was going for this what they call clean core model, which is abstract away everything that's kind of business related, keep your core system, like you're saying, your rules, all your, the standard stuff. away from humans, and you do that on another layer and then interact, pretty much via APIs. And that's why I go back to, do you think that the ERP as we know it, as a piece of software that has an interface that you go in and configure, is going to be around as in, and I'm particularly talking about Dynamics 365, finance, do you see that being around in the near future, or do you see it not going away in any hurry and people continue to interface that way?

00:08:40 Christian Segurado
Think about it from a cloud transformation standpoint. We're still having customers approaching us data on A400 or somewhere on-prem, right? So I do think it will still be like that, like accessible, like really UI. However, I think a lot of digital transformation leaders, corporations that want to get competitive advantages will jump on that agentic train and make that navigation path that is a bit more cumbersome and lengthy. make that obsolete eventually. But will it be next year? No. Will it be next three years? Probably not. Because again, thinking about it, there's still customers, especially in the SMB space or that, you know, I guess mid-market space, that are still on antiquated architecture. They cannot even play the game yet. They cannot even have the entry card to unlock the agentic experiences because you cannot start with the roof if you don't have the foundation.

00:09:30 Mark Smith
That's brilliant. That's a really good analogy. So How should teams start to rethink scoping, fit gap when it comes to AI systems? If you're rolling out today, you must be thinking about it a bit differently with the tools that you have at your disposal than what you would have done a couple of years ago.

00:09:51 Christian Segurado
Yes, we actually internally have AI or agentic driven methodology that we recently rolled out. What this is it about is If you think about it traditionally, European implementation, right? Let's say, let's talk about both of us, right? I know you're very thorough, you're very detailed, you know, you have a scope and requirement session, and you're very good at documenting it in a specific way. You always follow the rules, but I'm A slacker, right? And I take, you know, two, three weeks to do the documentation, and maybe I'm not really, you know, I'm international, you know, sometimes I do throw a little wrong word in here, but it's very, From A consistent quality standpoint, that's not a given. And from a time perspective, you spend a lot of time on understanding, comprehending, documenting, and defining before you actually solve the business problem, what is the fit gap? So what we did, Bill, is an agentic experience is that priority conversation that we have is often on Teams. It is orchestrating an agentic experience, taking the requirements and the status quo definition out of it, and creating an ADO item automatically. Yeah. So if you see that is an X4, X5 in terms of implementation time, means X4, X5 that we can add more value to the customer. So I don't, this is how I really see it. And we're seeing already the first fruits that are harvested from that implementation approach.

00:11:17 Mark Smith
I was talking to somebody earlier today and they said something interesting that when they take on new grads, they're no longer teaching them how to sit their Power Platform exam or their Dynamics exam, which was their typical model in yesteryear, they're teaching them how to run effective workshops, how to do effective requirements gathering, and using the tools that, you know, at the disposal today. If you look at the first 30, 60, 90-day plan when you engage an organization, is that sped up? Is that happening faster now? Because how you can do your requirements gatherings or particularly doing them different? And also, is there less error? Because if you have the scenario that you just talked about there, which was you're doing it in teams, so I assume you're recording, and therefore you can do a requirements gathering match, and you could give it the context of what good looks like, right? What does a good requirements gathering session look like and the kind of deliverables that we should have at the end, which means that it would identify the gaps even more than in the past, the fit gap, and not so much the fit gap where we talk about it between the technology and what's available out-of-the-box or what the requirements are and what's available out-of-the-box. But the gap in, you know what, we didn't even address this and we needed to have addressed it. So hey, before we barreled down a road and We might not have fully understood the problem properly, so before we start architecting a solution, let's revisit item X or Y or whatever it might be. So are you seeing, one, higher quality, and two, a faster speed of that part of the process?

00:13:00 Christian Segurado
I think that was a loaded question. Higher quality, I would say more consistency in quality.

00:13:05 Mark Smith
Nice.

00:13:06 Christian Segurado
Right? The consistency is also what we're shooting for, because consistency creates predictability. Right? So that's number one. And there is, to your point, to the people aspect, there is a retraining. Because before I need to pay attention, take notes, and, German as I am, I take a lot of notes, and, need to rephrase it and document it then. And it's a lot of time where you literally just want to make sure that you check the box and it is, you have a shared understanding of the problem. between customer and consultant. Right now, it's actually you're starting from that because the documentation is there, the definition and the understanding of the business problem. You're starting to review. So from crafting, understanding, and defining, we shift our people aspect or attention to, let's review when everything is still hot in the brain, then straight after it, because it's orchestrating based on the Teams trigger, when it's stored on SharePoint afterwards, that's the trigger for the agent to run. Take a look and review the requirements that have been defined, comprehended for you, understood for you. So it is a different flow of work. it provides consistent quality. And we see also an increase in quality. And there's two aspects that I want to touch on, though. You mentioned also folks that join the Microsoft channel versus experts already. And there's a differentiation, differentiation. The experts, I mean, now can, you know, take a look at what Copilot spit out and say, hey, look, I mean, That is correct, or the fit gap is correct, but, or let me adjust this, or let me refine this, or that might be, not how I understood it. Let me revisit that with the customers. You can make the determination, right? A very junior consultant cannot do that yet, because he or she doesn't have the experience. They haven't solved those business problems in the past. So how can you have that experience? So from that standpoint, if you ask me, hey, Do you still go through those boot camps and so on? Yes. And I was blessed actually that I was leading our internal boot camp last year. It's actually one year mark of my mentee. And I still went through the legacy format, how you want to call it, because I believe it's important to understand the baseline. It's kind of like you let me architect the bridge and I have no idea about engineering. I mean, that will be probably a bad outcome for whoever drives over the bridge. So I still think you need to be taught the fundamentals of the ecosystem, of the platform, to be able to use those tools that are now at your disposal. I hope I could answer that. I mean, it was a really good question, a loaded question as well.

00:15:49 Mark Smith
Yeah, no, it is interesting the way or the speed that things are changing at the moment. Do you see it changing much more as in particularly, as in And I'm interested, I suppose, in your definition of agent, because in what I heard from what you said, you said that agent then picks up because the SharePoint trigger was the meeting, et cetera. Now, when you think about agents, are you talking about something that is following kind of like an if-then type statement in its analysis, or is it truly agentic that it has a soul, it updates itself, it can rewrite its as in its soul, it can rewrite its agentic status, or is it all strictly prescribed? And so it's following a more rules-based engine in how it works.

00:16:42 Christian Segurado
Very good question. We have multiple agents actually in an orchestration. One of them is just a trigger every time a new recording dropped on a SharePoint site, get that agent started, right? But from there, we say, hey, I understand the context, take the transcripts, understand the business problems, figure out the requirements. We give context and topics and tools. And the tools are actually Azure DevOps Connector, so it can create a, the DevOps item automatically when it is, defining a business problem. So it does have a soul. It is triggered at a given point in time because we don't want to burn through credits as well, right? We still have some guardrails when to kick it off, but it does, it is comprehending a transcript and crafting a message, crafting knowledge. understanding what tools, what files we gave it as a grounding. Again, the first agent is the scope of requirement. The second part is actually fit gap where we use Microsoft Learn documents and internal, kind of pronounce it, prioritary. Yeah, proprietary. Exactly.Thank you for helping me. Documents that we have built over the past to validate if it's a fit standard, if there's a funny workaround. And actually it was interesting. with a customer that was looking for dispatching from their trucks. And we implemented at a customer in the past, the point of sale as a workaround, right? Point of sale is actually retail functional as you know, to like do check-in, check-out at a cash and carry transaction. But what we did for a food and beverage customer in the past, we implemented a point of sale just for the inventory management capabilities. And there was a similar scenario that customer described and was picking that up because again, it was in our repository of non resources. So it does have a soul, but we also want to make sure we trigger it at the right time to run it as cost efficient as possible. As you know, tokens accumulate very quickly.

00:18:44 Mark Smith
So what's your thoughts then about, let's take two Microsoft products, Copilot Studio and and let's say Foundry and Azure. Is your teams, and are you leaning more to going direct to Foundry and building your solutions, or are you leaning more to Copilot Studio, which is the kind of WYSIWYG, you know, interface? What's your preference, and what are you seeing happening across your teams?

00:19:10 Christian Segurado
Very good question. I think I guess a pyramid, meaning at the moment, customers are still with, you know, getting the hands dirty with the out-of-the-box experiences. Copilot Studio, most of my team is working with Copilot Studio, I would probably say 70% of it. And we have a custom development team as well that does, you know, Azure Foundry work. That's probably about 30% of the work that we're doing. So I still think a lot of it is in the low-code, no-code area. Specifically after the new MCP server was released, when was that? was it a year from now? No, it was less than a year, four months, five months, something like that when the new MCP server for ERP got released. Because that really redesigned architecture really unlocked value. Before it was just 11 actions you can trigger, right? It was very limited to 11 use cases, so to speak. And now it's actually behaving like a user. It's navigating specific forms and triggering actions based on understanding of the prompt. So It unlocked the world is the oyster use cases, so to speak.

00:20:12 Mark Smith
Interesting. Interesting. Because I'm like, why do you need MCP server? Why wouldn't you just use OAuth and APIs and do it yourself without the baggage of every scenario being accommodated?

00:20:27 Christian Segurado
You could also do that, right? But it would be a bit more targeted.Let's say you know there is an agentic experience in there, or like the prompt will be in the procurement area realm. Instead of building all those, you know, APIs out, as you just said, if you use the MCP server, it covers that scope, if that makes sense. So if you say, hey, I create a purchase requisition, or hey, check the purchase order, or cancel this order, or hey, we have a new contract, let's make sure we create, like it will cover the broader scope with less time and effort spent, while you're not cornered in just Limited use cases, if that makes sense.

00:21:05 Mark Smith
Makes sense?

00:21:05 Christian Segurado
And so I think the strategy is pretty smart for Microsoft to, that it changed the architecture because it enables a different, broader audience to use it. And as I said, give the kid a little bit sugar and hopefully, you know, there's more adoption that way.

00:21:20 Mark Smith
I think when we first talked, you were heavily into maybe the metaverse we were talking about back then. We might have been talking about HoloLens. back in the day. Where's all that stuff that Microsoft invested probably billions of dollars in? Where's all that gone? Has it gone, gone? Or does it exist anymore? Is it all retired?

00:21:46 Christian Segurado
Well, I would say that way. Everything's overshadowed by AI, right? So first of all, that part, you could also see what Meta did in terms of, you know, some de-investment on certain products and so on. So I do think Investment dollars go more towards AI because there is a clear productivity gain, aka value, and customers are willing to spend dollars on it, right? I mean, if you think as a businessman, not as a nerd like we are, right, this is really driving more value. Do I think it's gone? No, I don't think so. There's still a lot of companies that work on it.

00:22:25 Mark Smith
But Microsoft doesn't do HoloLens anymore, do they? Have they discontinued it?

00:22:29 Christian Segurado
No, the Microsoft is out of, they're still doing mesh.

00:22:34 Mark Smith
Right, mesh is what I was meaning. It wasn't metaverse, it was mesh, yeah.

00:22:38 Christian Segurado
Correct. Microsoft Mesh is still a product and also there, was an architecture change in terms of, you know, where you needed to be somewhat like a, you know, pro developer to build those experiences, those 3D environments. It is more like template-based now, and again, enabling A broader audience to think it's smart. But I do also think that the value prop is a more connected experience. And at the moment, specifically where, I guess economically folks are very wisely spending their dollars, I do think they spend it more on productivity gain or technology spend against productivity gain instead of like an intangible value of connective experience. So I think this is really where I see the market going. Is it gone? I don't think so. I think it's more put on the shelf for the time being and will come back with force.

00:23:35 Mark Smith
And so, but you said Mesh has still got use cases, et cetera. What's the, is Mesh still lit up in Teams? Is that where your kind of interface was?

00:23:45 Christian Segurado
Yes. I mean, initially it was kind of outside of Teams, right? It was a separate app. What's, you know, users want to have seamless experience. They want to be able to toggle back and forth. Otherwise, you know, logging in is in a different application, and then it is just wasn't seamless. So, yes, it is actually embedded in Teams as a in a premium and a premium SKU available as the premium SKU.

00:24:09 Mark Smith
Yeah, And what's the use case for it?

00:24:12 Christian Segurado
Still connected connectivity, connected experience. If you're in a remote environment, sometimes you feel on an island. You can have trainings that are more interactive, right? I mean, you know it. I mean, if I host a training internally, sometimes externally, right? I know after 2 minutes, you know, half the audience zooms out, it's not on video and stuff like that. So you get healthy pressure to be walking through that experience. So you need to be present, even though you're far away. again, has an intangible value. It's very hard to justify, say, hey, look, this brings you X amount of dollars, because it's more around the person, it's around the people aspect, that feeling that it conveys, rather than you can save X amount of dollars or be X amount of more productive.

00:24:56 Mark Smith
Yeah, interesting. Okay, it's crystal ball time. What's your predictions for 2026? Where are we going to be in tech? What's going to happen? Where do you think, particularly in your area of tech, what changes do you think we'll see this year?

00:25:11 Christian Segurado
What I would say is that, let me take it from a people process and technology side. From a technology side, I do think multi-agent, multi-model will be the norm, right? Certain models will be better in certain tasks than others and really exposing that competitive advantage of certain models versus the others. So we see a lot of really good work on Claude, actually really good outcomes on certain use cases. So I see that. I would say multi-agent orchestration, right? Instead of just one use case where you prompt one agent, it will actually trigger a, you know, like a nested agents to do a lot of work for you. I think it will change also from a people aspect, how corporations train their people. It will have impact on hiring, in my opinion, meaning, as I said, juniors will have, I think, a harder entry in the job market. That's at least my perspective. From a process perspective, I'm most curious about the process part.

00:26:17 Mark Smith
Interesting.

00:26:18 Christian Segurado
Because you're working in a digital transformation space for, you know, years, you know that. So often it is very hard for organizations to re-envision the status quo in front of from a process standpoint. So we have always done it that way.

00:26:32 Mark Smith
Yeah, exactly.

00:26:33 Christian Segurado
But that agentic experience forces to re-envision everything you've done.

00:26:38 Mark Smith
I like this.

00:26:39 Christian Segurado
And I think that will be that will be the crux of 2026. Organizations that open to it will drive a lot of value. Organizations that are resistant to change, I think will actually be left behind or, you know, left behind is maybe too strong, will have it a hard will have a a harder time, I would say.

00:26:59 Mark Smith
Awesome. Chris, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it.

00:27:03 Christian Segurado
Thank you so much for having me and hope to be here maybe in a year's worth of time and see you soon. Thanks, Mark.

00:27:10 Mark Smith
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, Business Application MVP, Mark Smith, otherwise known as the nz365guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffee.com forward slash nz365guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the starts.