This week’s roundup captures a push by vendors to embed agentic AI across ERP, EAM and databases—from low‑code agent builders and AI connectors to homomorphic encryption claims—while independent validation and enterprise‑grade governance lag behind.
Summer’s tech news cycle kept one foot in engineering detail and the other on governance. This week’s round-up — anchored by two Enterprise Times podcasts — ranged from grand claims about fully homomorphic encryption to pragmatic discussions of agentic AI in enterprise asset management, and from senior hires to a flurry of product launches and an acquisition that underlines the rush to make AI agents easier to build and govern.
Two conversations set the tone. In one podcast Sam Swift, an adviser to Vaultree, talked through the firm’s take on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and the company’s longer-term ambition to make “data-in-use” encryption a practical, everyday technology. Vaultree has publicly asserted that a next‑generation FHE algorithm addresses long-standing scalability and performance constraints, enabling operations on always‑encrypted data at near‑plaintext speeds. According to a Business Wire announcement earlier this year, the company has released demonstration results, patent filings and an ePrint paper and has invited outside review — although independent validation remains essential before enterprises can rely on such claims in production. In the second podcast, Chris Van den Belt, Head of Product Management at Ultimo (an IFS company), described a deliberately conservative, value-first approach to agentic AI in Enterprise Asset Management, explaining how Ultimo selected its first use case to deliver measurable benefit rather than automated novelty. Both discussions highlighted a familiar industry dynamic: rapid technical ambition tempered, at least verbally, by a demand for clear business outcomes.
Appointments and leadership moves underlined combatting complexity with experience. Epicor on 11 August 2025 named Kerrie Jordan as its chief marketing officer, tasking her with driving global brand growth and accelerating the vendor’s Cognitive ERP vision; Epicor said her product and go‑to‑market background made her well suited to the role. Freshworks and Medallia also added senior sales and revenue leaders respectively as vendors gear up for growth across EMEA and enterprise markets.
On the commercial front, partnerships and customer wins continued apace. Boku announced a strategic tie‑up with Canva to broaden payments reach in Asia and Europe. Riskified joined forces with HUMAN Security on ecommerce fraud prevention. Customer selections included 10X Banking’s cloud‑native core chosen by the Co‑operative Bank New Zealand and Forterro’s Orderwise Cloud ERP replacing a legacy stack at Work Wear Mallusk. Case studies from Kantata and Cybage recounted operational improvements achieved through new platforms and modern engineering techniques, including halving customer onboarding time and improving API and UI performance for healthcare clients.
Product development emphasised AI‑enabled capabilities across the stack. Certinia’s Summer ’25 release updated its Professional Services, Financial Management and Customer Success clouds and added new agentic AI features, the company said. MongoDB used the Ai4 conference to announce integrated Voyage AI models that bring context awareness and improved price‑performance for embedding and re‑ranking tasks, positioning the models as tools to reduce hallucinations and speed production AI applications. Oracle NetSuite published documentation for a new AI Connector Service that supports a Model Context Protocol: the documentation explains how standards‑based, role‑aware connectors can let customers “bring your own AI” to ERP data while maintaining permissions, auditability and other controls.
Those technical accelerations are colliding with a stark governance reality. According to research from the Infosys Knowledge Institute, 78% of surveyed executives view Responsible AI as a business growth driver but just 2% meet Infosys’ gold standard for RAI controls. The report, Responsible Enterprise AI in the Agentic Era, found 95% of respondents had experienced AI‑related incidents and 86% expect agentic AI to increase risk. Infosys recommends centralised RAI offices, platform‑level guardrails and a blend of product agility with tight governance to limit reputational and financial exposure while still realising AI’s benefits.
Workday’s acquisition of Flowise, announced on 14 August 2025, is a direct market response to that imperative. Workday said the deal brings a low‑code, visual agent builder and debugging, evaluation and analytics tools into its platform — capabilities it argued will let customers prototype and govern HR and finance agents more rapidly. Peter Bailis, Workday’s chief technology officer, said in the acquisition announcement that integrating Flowise will make agent development more reliable and accessible; Henry Heng, Flowise’s CEO, said joining Workday would accelerate the company’s open‑source vision. The transaction underlines a wider vendor strategy: make agentic AI easier to build, but attach governance and monitoring capabilities to reduce deployment risk.
The week also surfaced examples of migration and scale projects. London Gatwick completed a cloud migration of its EAM and ERP stack, including IFS Ultimo, moving to a cloud‑based solution that went live in November 2024 and will bring 900 contractor companies onto the Ultimo EAM system in 2025. NetSuite highlighted NEORide’s move to Oracle NetSuite for Government to standardise finance and operations across multiple public transit entities. FourKites added Dov Shenkman, a long‑time supply chain executive, to its strategic advisory council; Shenkman described the convergence of AI and supply chain management as a generational transformation that can move operations from reactive to self‑orchestrating.
Two clear themes emerge from the week’s activity. First, vendors are racing to embed agentic AI into core business systems — from ERP connectors and low‑code agent builders to database models tuned for retrieval and re‑ranking. Second, independent evaluation and robust governance lag the pace of productisation. Vaultree’s FHE claims and MongoDB’s Voyage models both promise technical advances that could materially change how enterprises handle data and build AI. Yet the Infosys findings — and Workday’s explicit emphasis on governance in the Flowise deal — show the market is acutely aware that capability without controls invites incidents.
For practitioners the near‑term advice is practical: treat agentic features as platform changes, not bolt‑ons. Adopt platform‑level guardrails, role‑based access, staged rollouts and central oversight — the very prescriptions Infosys outlines — and demand independent validation where vendors make novel security or performance claims. Vendors and customers may both talk about acceleration, but this week’s developments also show that acceleration without accountability is a recipe for costly setbacks.
Source: Noah Wire Services
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