Connecting AI to your ERP: what actually has to happen
Every vendor says their tool integrates with your system. Here are the four things that have to be true, and which one usually is not.
« It integrates with your ERP » is the sentence that sells the most AI software to Swiss SMEs and means the least. Four separate things have to work, and vendors tend to demonstrate the first one and assume the rest.
The four requirements
1. A way in. Your system has to expose its data somehow: an interface, a database connection, a scheduled export. Older Swiss ERP installations often have one that technically exists and has never been used, and the person who understands it retired.
2. A way to identify things. The AI tool finds « Muster AG » in a document. Your ERP knows customer 4417. Something must reliably connect those two, and that something is your master data. This is where projects fail, as covered in March, and it is not a technical problem.
3. A way back in. Reading is the easy half. Writing a booking, creating a record, updating a status — that needs permissions, validation and a defined behaviour when the write fails halfway. Many integrations are read-only and the proposal does not say so.
4. A way to see what happened. The six fields from February. Without them, the first discrepancy becomes an argument between two vendors while you hold the invoice.
The question that reveals the truth
Ask the vendor: show me this working against a copy of our data, not your demo data.
A vendor who has done this before will say yes and ask for an export. One who has not will explain why their demo environment is representative. The second answer is the whole answer.
The realistic expectation
For most Swiss SMEs running an established ERP, a full two-way integration is a real project measured in weeks, and the cost sits mostly in items two and three rather than in the AI.
A one-way version — the AI reads, proposes, and a person enters the result — delivers perhaps seventy per cent of the benefit for perhaps twenty per cent of the effort. For a first project that is the right trade, and it is worth asking for explicitly, because no vendor will propose the smaller version unprompted.