Top 10 business applications stories of 2025

1. Is agentic AI the beginning of the end for ERP?

The rise of agentic AI promises much for enterprise resource planning (ERP), possibly even its supersession. But ERP isn’t dead – it’s just evolving as it seeks to govern AI.

Predictions of ERP’s demise are not new. Client-server was supposed to kill the mainframe, cloud was meant to kill on-premise ERP, and best-of-breed applications were forecast to dismantle the suite. It didn’t happen. Instead, incumbents adapted and survived.

Now comes agentic AI, the latest technology to rattle the ERP cage. For some, it’s a natural progression: a chance to add real automation to manage clunky and cumbersome tasks. For others, it’s an opportunity to break the mould and rewrite enterprise software history.

2. How AI can help to optimise supply chains under pressure

In a bravura piece, we looked at how companies are responding with AI, nearshoring and planning as globalisation takes a new nationalistic, Trumpian twist.

Globalisation has boosted trade for decades, but crises, tariffs and climate change have made supply chains more fragile.

2008 was the year of the global financial crisis, which saw the collapse of banks, including Lehman Brothers. Merchandise trade fell sharply in 2009 and has zigzagged sideways since, staying below 50% of global GDP.

International trade in goods has been hit by one thing after another: the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010; the UK’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016; the Covid pandemic from 2020; the Suez Canal blockage in 2021; and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. US President Donald Trump’s rapidly changing tariffs are just the latest problem.

Globalisation has “probably gone a step too far”, said Emile Naus, a UK-based partner of Amsterdam-headquartered consultancy BearingPoint and previously head of logistics strategy for retailer Marks and Spencer, which has meant companies relying on suppliers on the other side of the world to deliver goods on time, with little margin for error.

Richard Howells, vice-president for solution management at German ERP software provider SAP, said software suppliers have supported supply chain acceleration over several years by improving integration between software applications, moving to cloud computing and increasing the use of AI.

Referring to a podcast he hosts on the future of supply chains, Howells said: “We don’t get through an episode without mentioning AI. I should ring a bell every time someone mentions it. It is a game-changer for supply chains and for businesses in general.”

3. Sapphire 2025: BASF evolves business with move to SAP S/4Hana

Germany-based global chemical giant BASF has elected to move its SAP IT estate to an S/4Hana private cloud to evolve its business in uncertain times.

The chemical industry giant is moving its SAP IT estate to the supplier’s S/4Hana ERP system as part of a business modernisation strategy, it was announced at the SAP Sapphire user and partner conference in Madrid.

Petra Scheithe, senior vice-president of digitalization of services and ERP platforms at BASF Business Services, outlined the latest development in the company’s long-standing relationship with SAP in an interview with Computer Weekly.

BASF, which employs around 112,000 people, has been an SAP customer for 40 years. Its headquarters in Ludwigshafen are a half-hour drive from SAP’s in Walldorf.

According to a joint SAP/BASF statement, the chemical firm “adopted a hybrid system landscape to integrate SAP S/4Hana Cloud into BASF’s vast system and reduce the complexity of on-premise management. With a clean core strategy in place, any new customisations and functional extensions will be cloud-ready, allowing simplified system maintenance and operations in the long run.”

BASF also intends to use SAP’s AI and sustainability software. 

4. Salesforce execs at TDX 25: Agentforce a whole system AI play

Salesforce executives presented its Agentforce agentic AI technology as a “whole system” approach not hung up on large language models (LLMs) at its developer conference, TDX, in March. They called it a “holy trinity” of data, apps and agents. Relatedly, they consistently disparage “DIY” AI programmes.

Paula Goldman, the supplier’s chief ethical and humane use officer, said: “I think a lot of the public discourse about AI has been about [large language] models. But if you think about Agentforce, it’s a whole system. There’s a foundation model, and then there’s a series of smaller models that go into our Atlas system, and there are workflows that are automated that people can draw on. We’ve got used to talking about AI as models over the past few years, but I think we need to be talking about systems.”

5. Oracle plants agentic AI flag in business process automation

Oracle promoted its agentic AI studio, unveiled at OracleCloud World Tour London in March, as an avowed business process automation accelerant.

The supplier put forward its AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications as a platform for orchestrating AI agents and teams of agents.

Steve Miranda, executive vice-president of Oracle Applications Development, said AI Agent Studio was part of an ongoing, quarter-by-quarter unfolding of the supplier’s particular approach to artificial intelligence for business process improvement.

Other suppliers have their narratives, based on their own capacities. Salesforce is wagering on Agentforce, based on combining data, applications and virtual agents, with a sales automation and customer experience orientation, minimising “do it yourself” AI.

Oracle’s story is that its cloud Fusion Applications make up a suite that covers all business applications, from ERP, through supply chain management and human capital management to customer experience. It said its AI use cases and agents can now be orchestrated to go across all of those business disciplines, and they all rest on Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure.

6. ServiceNow K25: McDermott vaunts agentic AI platform as revolutionary

At its Knowledge 25 customer and partner conference in May, ServiceNow painted an orchestrated agentic AI future for its Now platform and targeted customer relationship management (CRM) as a prime field for growth.

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott hailed AI as an “absolute requirement” for the survival of humanity at the conference in Las Vegas.

“AI is civilisation’s opportunity of this century. It is a gateway to prosperity. It is the only $22tn global market opportunity between now and 2030. It’s the only opportunity to take out $4tn in operating expenses. This is not an incremental change. This intelligence super-cycle is an exponential transformation, and it is bigger than the internet,” he said.

ServiceNow is putting the same emphasis on agentic AI as other big enterprise software firms, such as Oracle and Salesforce.

It announced an increase in the embedding of agentic AI in its service platform, which was originally developed for IT service management, with its Now platform.

7. Salesforce: CIOs closer to the bridge than ever due to agentic AI

By October/November, Salesforce research into how CIOs are using agentic AI found the technology to be making their roles more strategic than ever within their businesses.

The CRM supplier conducted an online survey with market research firm NewtonX among 200 CIOs from 24 countries in October 2025. This was the second year of the survey.

It found that AI implementation has increased by 282% since 2024, from 11% to 42%, and the AI budget has nearly doubled. The CIOs surveyed said they were dedicating 30% of their AI budget to agentic AI specifically, so most is going to other forms of AI, such as GenAI and traditional machine learning AI. Nevertheless, 96% of CIOs said their company either currently uses or plans to use agentic AI in the next two years.

This increased use of AI seems to have boosted the self-esteem of CIOs. Three-quarters said they felt more confident in their role now than they did a year ago, and 97% said they knew more about AI now than they did a year ago.

The CIOs – as a direct consequence of agentic AI, according to the researchers – reported working most closely with CEOs over other C-suite executives as their role has increased in scope and importance. This has caused 94% of them to expand their skillsets, and 57% have deliberately honed their narrative-building and storytelling skills to prepare themselves for agentic AI.

8. How generative AI is playing out in the media industry

GenAI is proving to be a double-edged sword in society at large, but especially in the creative industries.

Many writers, illustrators and musicians see GenAI as a threat, something that exploits their creative work to produce algorithmic knock-offs, undermining their ability to make a living.

Industry bodies, companies and trade unions are campaigning against UK government plans to let AI firms use copyrighted material without permission or payment unless creators have opted out.

The Make it Fair campaign has involved many newspapers devoting their front pages to its slogan, and various musicians, including Kate Bush and Max Richter, released a silent album in protest.

But creators can also use GenAI to extend their abilities. Methods vary, but some organisations and individuals are finding ways to harness such systems to do new things in ways that support and develop their businesses.

Many media organisations are making some use of GenAI, although this means coping with the technology’s frequent errors. Research by the BBC, based on getting journalists to check AI-generated answers to questions on the broadcaster’s own stories produced by four services, found that half had significant issues and a fifth had factual errors.

9. Can business software empower rather than control workers?

Acclaim Autism is a US organisation that has increased employee “task discretion”, with an increase in insurance approvals by using AI. Nevertheless, worker autonomy is declining across the UK.

Acclaim Autism exists to help children with autism spectrum disorder, but before doing so, the Philadelphia-based company has to get approval from US health insurers. This typically takes six months.

By introducing process management software from Appian with support from consultancy Ignyte Group, the company now sees 95% of applications accepted by insurers, with approval typically taking less than a month. The software scans diagnosis documents using AI to locate key pieces of information and anticipates what specific insurers will require to approve treatment based on learning from previous rejections.

By breaking up a monolithic application process, Acclaim Autism increased its employees’ “task discretion” – the level of choice they have over how they carry out work. 

But many workers have seen these levels decrease over recent decades. The UK’s Skills and employment survey involves interviewers from the Welsh Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data talking to thousands of workers face-to-face and online.

In 1992, 62% of interviewees said they had a great deal of influence over how they worked, but that fell to 44% in 2021, and by 2024, just 34% said this was the case. Other indicators of worker autonomy, such as whether people feel they have influence over changes in their work, have also fallen.

10. Interview: Cambridge Consultants CEO Monty Barlow scans for tech surprises

Cambridge Consultants is a technology and consulting business unit of Capgemini. Its chief executive, Monty Barlow, talked to Computer Weekly about its heritage and vision for the future of digital technology.

As university towns, Cambridge and Oxford are oddly disconnected from the UK’s capital when compared with those in other European countries. France’s leading universities are mostly in Paris, by contrast.

This matters because the UK’s so-called “golden triangle” of London, Oxford and Cambridge is, arguably, less economically beneficial to the nation than it could be. Think of the synergies lost. One way an Oxford academic put this to me recently was that the “triangle lacks a hypotenuse”. Less mathematically, this meant, as an Oxford resident, when Computer Weekly’s enterprise applications editor visited the offices of Capgemini’s Cambridge Consultants on the Cambridge Science Park on a boiling hot day in June, he was unable to take an air-conditioned train from Oxford to Cambridge. 

When he got there, the CEO recounted how, in 1960, the firm’s founders had the simple idea of putting academic thinking at the disposal of industry, which today sounds obvious. “Now, MIT will have big accelerators. Universities are in on the act [so] it doesn’t seem so weird to bridge academia and industry. But at the time, it was,” said Barlow.

How does his firm decide which specific areas of technology to focus on?

“There’s a whole mix of things,” he said. “There are the insights coming from particular markets we work in, where people are starting to ask about emergent things. There’s the passion of the individuals who work here. And then there is bringing that all together.”

Their people could see some technology waves before they were in the mainstream, he said, adding: “We started going big on the proper deep learning AI revolution in the 2010s. I could see it coming a mile off, but the world took a while to notice.”