Every ERP conversation I have with a customer eventually arrives at the same complaint, phrased a dozen different ways: “I know the information is in there somewhere.” A buyer knows a blanket order is about to expire, but finding it means running a report. A finance manager knows there’s a budget variance worth investigating, but confirming it means three screens and a spreadsheet. The system has the answer. It just won’t give it up without a fight.

That’s the gap ChampionAI, our agentic AI platform, is built to close, and it shows up in Adaptive ERP in two different ways. Champion Assist is the conversational interface embedded directly inside the ERP itself, so every user can ask a question or make an update in plain English without leaving the screen they’re already on. Champions are a different thing entirely: standalone, role-based AI agents that run independently of any single ERP and operate an entire workflow on their own, end to end.

Put simply: Champion Assist answers and acts on what you ask it, in the moment. Champions operate in a workflow autonomously in the background, whether you’re in the room or not.

That’s the problem we set out to solve with our latest Adaptive ERP release, and it’s worth walking through in more depth. Not just what shipped, but why we built it in this order, and what it means for how you’ll run your operation next year.

Champion Assist: The Interface Built for How You Actually Work

Champion Assist is a natural language interface embedded directly inside Adaptive ERP, QAD Source and EQMS. It isn’t a chatbot bolted onto the login screen. It’s a way of interacting with the same screens, records, and data your teams already touch every day. You type what you need, and it answers or acts, right inside the product you’re already running.

Champion Assist is one interface, that adapts to who is using it – delivering role specific answers without needing separate apps for each team or department: 

• Buyers and Purchasing: Query the item catalog by supplier, buyer code, or product line without cross-referencing spec sheets by hand. Retrieve open blanket orders, surface the ones nearing expiry or sitting at a zero balance, and update supplier assignments or planning parameters conversationally instead of navigating multiple ERP screens per item. Create purchase orders and purchase requisitions by specifying supplier, items, and pricing in plain English, and catch missing or zero-price PO lines before they flow into accounts payable. Retrieve and update supplier certification records, including due dates and status, so expired certifications stop being a compliance surprise.
• Customer Service: Query and update sales orders by customer, date, status, or priority, and know within seconds whether an order is sitting on credit hold, without leaving the conversation to check.
• Production Planning: Query production orders by item, site, date, or status (firm, released, exploded, or closed) and close out completed runs with a single instruction instead of configuring a report.
• Finance and Cost Accounting: Query live budget and forecast data by entity, year, GL account, or period, and apply controlled forecast adjustments conversationally, such as increasing an expense line by a set percentage based on actuals. Run an AI audit across the item catalog to surface items with missing or zero standard costs before they distort margin reporting.
• Field Service: Query action requests and linked tasks by queue, severity, assignee, or due date, and create or update tasks (status, owner, due date) in the same conversation.

We didn’t need to bolt on a new system with its own login, its own permission model, and its own audit trail for your security team to evaluate from scratch. Because Champion Assist lives inside Adaptive ERP, QAD Source and EQMS, it inherits the access controls, permissions, and audit history you’ve already built. When your CIO asks whether this respects the controls already in place, the answer is yes.

Accounts Payable Champion: The Next Champion in the Family

Champions are built role by role in a different sense than Champion Assist is. Where Champion Assist has capabilities scoped by role, each Champion actually serves a specific role. Procurement Champion, Sourcing Champion, Sales Champion, and now Accounts Payable Champion are separate, standalone agents, each running on its own platform, independent of whichever ERP a manufacturer uses, and working an entire workflow end to end rather than waiting to be asked.

The Accounts Payable Champion joins our suite of persona-based ChampionAI agents, which have been running in production at manufacturers for months now. The results from that production use, not a lab demo, are what gave us the confidence to build a fourth.

At Sonic Manufacturing, the Procurement Champion reduced post-PO administrative work by 70 percent across 61 suppliers and more than 57,000 purchase order lines, returning roughly two hours a day to every senior buyer. That’s not a projected number; it’s what happened when we put an autonomous agent into a real buyer’s inbox and let it chase confirmations, validate shipping documentation, and run three-way matching on its own. Learn more about Sonic Manufacturing’s experience in the video below.

The Accounts Payable Champion extends that same model into the invoice-to-payment workflow: monitor, extract, validate, act, and escalate only the exception. It ingests invoices from email, supplier portals, and EDI regardless of format, extracts vendor, line item, amount, and PO reference data using OCR and LLMs, and performs three-way matching against the purchase order and goods receipt within tolerance. Matched invoices clear straight to the payment queue. Only genuine exceptions, like real mismatches, missing receipts, disputes, or coding gaps, land in front of an AP clerk, who reviews a clean, pre-populated record instead of keying one from scratch.

Beyond the AP function, this protects early-payment discounts and improves days payable outstanding without asking finance to add headcount as invoice volume grows. And because it runs on its own standalone platform, it deploys today on QAD Adaptive ERP, or on SAP, Infor, Epicor, or any QAD version back to Enterprise Edition 2016, without touching a single line of core legacy code.

Enhancing Adaptive ERP’s Functional Depth

ChampionAI gets the announcement headline because it’s the biggest shift in how Adaptive ERP behaves, but we didn’t stop there. I don’t want the functional work in this release to get lost in the AI conversation, because for a lot of you, these are the items that will save the most hours this quarter.

AI Costing Optimization

A new Purchase Price Variance capability inside Adaptive ERP identifies and explains cost variance as it happens, rather than forcing finance and procurement to reconstruct it during month-end close. It tracks supplier pricing behavior and volatility over time, investigates root causes behind cost anomalies, and helps prioritize which purchasing conversations to have first, turning a standard-cost analysis that used to live in a spreadsheet into something the system surfaces on its own.

France e-Document Compliance

New e-invoicing and compliance functionality helps customers meet France’s e-document mandate natively inside Adaptive ERP. We built this on an architecture designed to extend to additional regional compliance requirements as they come into force, starting with France.

Warehouse Rules Engine

Warehouse and distribution teams can now simulate a picking or put-away rule change before it goes live, seeing the projected effect on efficiency before committing to it. Once a rule is live, a full audit trail tracks every decision the algorithm makes, giving operations leaders visibility into why the system took a specific action the first time an automated rule surprises them.

Food & Beverage Enhancements

New Yield and Scrap reporting capabilities give food and beverage manufacturers native tools to manage the shelf life, recipe, and inventory tracking specific to perishable and recipe-based production, reducing reliance on the side systems and spreadsheets that have historically filled this gap.

Everyday Productivity Gains

This release also carries forward the productivity improvements we introduced last year across the Adaptive ERP interface:

• Intelligent fuzzy search that handles partial queries and typos across ERP screens
• Wrapped column headers and auto-filled whitespace on browse screens so data is readable without manual resizing
• The ability for users to pin their most frequently used actions, like “receive,” directly to the screens they work in every day

None of this is AI in the agentic sense, but all of it removes friction from a workday that’s full of it.

Why We Sequenced It This Way

We didn’t build Champion Assist, the Accounts Payable Champion, and this functional list into the same release by coincidence. An ERP that only records what already happened is no longer enough for the environment manufacturers are operating in. Some of that gap closes by giving every user a conversational way to work with data that was always technically “there” through Champion Assist. Some of it closes by putting an autonomous Champion on a workflow no one wants to do by hand. And some of it just closes by fixing the parts of the interface that have quietly cost your team time for years.

It’s also why we built the Accounts Payable Champion as an extension of an existing, proven model rather than a new experiment. Procurement, Sourcing, and Sales Champions already run in production, on standalone infrastructure, independent of which ERP a customer runs. That architecture is the reason we shipped a fourth Champion with confidence instead of caution.

Where This Fits If You Haven’t Started: Champion Advantage

None of this requires you to rip out what you’re running today. Champion Advantage is QAD’s AI-led approach to modernization, built on the idea that there’s no single correct starting point. It’s a structured, ongoing program with flexible entry points, each designed to deliver a measurable outcome on its own rather than a single project you either commit to fully or not at all.

One of those entry points, Lynx Champion, solves a problem I hear about constantly: customization lock-in. Manufacturers spend years building custom code into their ERP to match how their business actually runs, and that customization becomes the very thing that makes modernization feel too risky to attempt. Lynx Champion scans a legacy environment, catalogs every customization, and explains what each one does in plain English, turning 6 to 8 weeks of manual discovery workshops into 2 to 3 days. From there, it actively re-architects a large share of that custom code into clean, upgrade-safe cloud extensions, rather than just producing a report and leaving the rewrite to your team. The result is a manufacturer who can see a credible, de-risked path to a modern core without abandoning the business logic that makes them competitive.

Whether the barrier standing between you and modernization is “we don’t know what our system will do if we touch it” or “we don’t have time to run every workflow by hand,” there’s now a specific, proven answer for either one, and every entry point leads to the same modern, adaptive enterprise.

We’ll keep shipping in this rhythm going forward, adding agentic capability, conversational access, and functional depth as each is needed.

Champion Assist and the Accounts Payable Champion are available now within QAD Adaptive ERP. Read the full announcement, or go to www.qad.com to learn more.