Digital Workforce in JD Edwards: What Changes Over the Next 3 Years?

What will the JD Edwards workforce look like three years from now? In this episode of Not Your Grandpa’s JD Edwards, ERP Suites CEO Mike Moorman explores the future of AI agents and digital workers, how they will transform business processes, and what this shift means for employees and the role of JD Edwards. Discover why organizations need to start preparing for an AI-powered future today.

What happens to your JD Edwards organization when some of the people doing the work aren't people at all?

And if AI agents begin owning parts of business processes, is your JD Edwards environment actually ready for that?

Today, we're looking three years ahead at what the digital workforce could mean for JD Edwards, your people, and the way work gets done.

By the end, you will have a clearer idea of what to start preparing for now and what not to run into.

Welcome back to Not Your Grandpa's JD Edwards. I'm your host Nate Bushfield.

And today we are looking beyond individual AI tools and asking maybe a bigger question. What happens when digital workers become a normal part of the enterprise? How does work change? What happens to the JDE business analysts and developers? Does the ERP screen become less important while the ERP itself becomes more important?

And if the future is only a few years away, what should leaders be doing now?

But joining me today is ERP Suites' CEO, Mike Moorman, to help us look ahead and separate what's realistic from what's hype.

Mike, welcome to the show. For those out there that maybe haven't met you yet, could you give them a little bit of background around JD Edwards?

Sure. Well, thanks for having me on. First time being on so should be exciting. Looking forward to this.

So a little background, Mike Moorman, I'm based here in Cincinnati, OH. So just give you a little bit of my experience. I've been in the IT field since 1998, been working with JD Edwards since then as well. So a lot of technical background, but also a lot of business as well going forward.

So a little bit of my role here at ERP Suites is to really help guide the company and where the future is going and what we want to do and try to do here. So I think that'd be pertinent to today's discussion.

So looking forward to see what the future holds for everybody.

Exactly. You are definitely in a very specific position to give a little bit of an insight of where we're going as a company, but also where ERPs in general are really going with the whole new AI initiative.

I say new, but it's been around for a few years.

What Will a Digital Workforce Look Like in Three Years?

But when you picture an enterprise three years from now, what does a digital workforce actually look like?

Yeah. So I, I, I think it's an exciting time, to be honest with you, because, you know, we have so much repetitive tasks that people do today and stuff that, you know, we necessarily don't enjoy a lot of times, right?

And if you take a, if you take a lot of JD Edwards users, the number one complaint we always hear a lot of times is like too many screens to go to, too many clicks, right?

And so what we're going to start seeing over in three years is this hybrid workforce that we're going to have. We're still going to have humans. Everybody's still scared about that, right? So everybody's scared, hey, I'm going to lose my job, right?

But I think the work for humans that you're going to see becomes just more important and more meaningful than doing necessary redundant tasks that you have.

So I think what you're going to see if we give it a little bit and start here, I think we're going to see companies kind of start off slowly with a digital workforce.

And, and, and reasons for that is, you know, really kind of yeah, the word I always love and we use it in sales all the time. It's about trust.

And there's this big trust that's going to have to happen within the industry to really trust through these AI agents. Are they going to do what they say to do? Are we going to have the right guardrails, the right governance around it, right? They're not going to get outside their sandbox.

Honestly, that's a big topic nowadays, right? And, and run rogue, right?

So right now the industry is very skittish. So I think what you're going to see, we're going to start off slowly, but I think in three years, what's going to be fascinating is the number of digital workers that are going to be a part of a company.

And those digital workers, what I, I envision is you're going to have a lot of them working with each other and also with a hybrid human side, right?

But those digital workers, even though we might be talking a little bit about JD Edwards, they're going to work with other digital workers. They're going to work with digital workers outside your, outside your organization, right? And really going to automate and really help in, you know, processing so much faster than what we have today.

Now we talked a little bit about the human side, right? And the human side changes a little bit, like I said, it becomes more meaningful.

So they're going to have to manage these workers just like they do today. People still have to manage these workers.

So, but at the end of the day, the relationships, the judgment, the different things that I think the humans still going to be involved and very important in there is just going to add more meaningful activities to their plate versus having to do the things, the daily tasks that, you know, these agents are going to be able to do more efficiently.

Yeah, it's good that you brought up those tasks. Now, are we looking at heading towards like more of a few specialized agents that we're going to be seeing or is it going to be like hundreds and hundreds of digital workers that own different parts of the business?

I think we'll see, I think it's going to be a little bit in there.

I think in the beginning, in the first year or two, we're definitely going to see specialized agents, right, and talked a little bit about that trust.

But and there's going to be specific parts of the business that we can really, yeah, they're going to be pain points. They're going to be things that we can take advantage of to help, help kind of progress the companies that, you know, in, in, in those areas that are, you know, manual, a lot of manual type tasks that workers are going to get through.

So these specialized agents, I think you will also see not just like in accounting, for example, right?

You're going to see specialized ones in accounting, but it's really going to be in the different parts of the, of each company and they're going to look at their business and say, you know, for example, in a homebuilder side, right?

You know, what in the homebuilding industry can we take advantage of them?

They're going to be very specific and we're working on some today like the community setup or closing a house, right?

Those are very specialized honestly to those companies, but they're very critical to that nature, but also a lot of manpower that takes into for those, those processes.

So I think our business is going to pick and choose what part of their business makes a lot of sense in that, you know, from specialized agents.

Again, I think you're going to add more and more agents on, but you know, I don't see, I don't know.

I, I think at the end of the day, I think you'll, you'll see, I don't know how to say this. I want to say maybe, you know, a 60/40 split maybe down the road of, you know, agents versus humans that you see in there.

So, so yeah, I think definitely specialized. But at the end of the day, they'll grow more and more over the three years that we see.

Yeah. And I like, I like that idea there where, yeah, they're going to start off with more specialized. But even though they can take out more parts of your business, it doesn't mean that they're any less specialized.

They can be certain pieces of this puzzle and they can just grow to a certain amount. Will it be hundreds? Maybe, maybe not.

But we have seen them grow over time even in this last year of us really focusing on them to the extent that, yeah, in the next three years there could be that jump.

That 60/40 split is very interesting to me too, because, yeah, I mean, we're at least the agents that I've seen us make. They can take over a certain process, a certain part of each business.

But yeah, I can see that down. Give us more time then.

Yeah, it can take over in a certain, certain extent, I should say.

But when we're talking about the word—no, sorry, go ahead.

I was going to say, I think we're, we're when we look at three years, I think what we're trying to tell customers, and this is a very interesting kind of idea.

You know, today, if, if you look, you know, like, let's, let's take the, let's go back to the homebuilder industry for a minute, right?

They, they have their typical competitors, right? And that's the one most of us always concentrate on is who are our competitors today that are doing, you know, the same things, OK.

They're going to reduce, you know, their human workforce with these digital agents, are going to save costs on there, right?

So it's kind of that race to, you know, can I, how much money can I save? Can I build a house cheaper than the next guy that I have?

But what we're trying to tell customers today, when you look at these agents, it's not the competitors that you see in front of you. It's the competitors you don't see.

And the reason we say that is, and there's a great example I've been using here lately, it's the, it's the new startup.

They will build the homes. They're still going to have the subs, but at the end of the day, all the back office stuff, all the general administration stuff that they have on their books, it's probably going to be done by the digital workforce.

So they will have this competitive advantage because today your competitor has a human workforce that they have to work through and with the digital workforce, but the competitors back, back in the day or the new, these new competitors won't have that kind of debt that they have, right, that they have to work through.

There's an interesting company today called Instinct that I just heard. They're valued at $10 billion, right?

And saying you're sitting there now that's a valuation. It's not necessarily what their revenues are.

When you sit there and you look at it, the next line was amazing to me. They're valued at $10 billion and they have 14 employees.

So obviously they're doing a lot of things with the digital workforce.

So if they only got 14 people and then be able to be a $10 billion thing, those are the new competitors that we're trying to preach to our customers to say, hey, be careful here.

This is why it's going to be important.

I know we'll get more into that, but this is one of the reasons you got to be careful of the new competitors that are coming up that don't have that structure in place with all the, with all that workforce, the human workforce they have today.

Yeah. So what would you say? Like what work would really move to agents and what work would maybe stay with those 14 humans?

Sure. So think of it this way, anything that, any type of work kind of doing part that we call it anything that could be around a set of rules-based, any tasks that have rules-based, right.

And those are going to be very easy to learn those, what those rules are and how to handle those tasks that you have.

So very repetitive type tasks can be in there. It can be information gathering, it can be reconciliation type tasks.

So a lot of different type tasks that, you know, that these agents are going to be able to perform. And again, they're going to have a set of rules usually with it, right?

And the beauty of it, to be honest, right, is, you know, if, if they're on their, let's say, home closing, if we go back to the industry and they're on their 20th home closing, you and I might get tired of doing it when an agent is not going to get tired, right?

And that, you know, you and I are going to take a break, right? And hopefully go home and, and rest up and do other things versus working all the time where these agents don't.

So from a, from an agent side, you're going to see those tasks that, that are going to be pushed off to the agent in that.

So then what's left to the human, right? What's left to those 14 people that we have in there?

So a couple of things that are going to be in there. One, anything that needs judgment. And so again, kind of that rules versus judgment.

So if, if, if something in there you need to make a judgment call, an agent is not going to be good at that.

The only way we know that is unless it's like, hey, I've seen this 100 times. You answered the same way 100 times, right? You did the same process 100 times. And it's like, OK, I know how to do that.

But if you have to make a, a judgment call and it's different each time, an agent won't be good, won't learn how to do that.

So that's going to be number one. Number two is really going to be around relationships.

Yeah.

So handling, it could be a partner relationship, it can be leadership, it could be in, in within employee relationships, right.

So agents aren't going to do a really good job of calling your partner and doing any type of negotiations, right?

They're not going to be good in any of those kind of relationships, kind of building parts.

So, you know, those, those type of tasks will be still left with humans, you know, and I think you'll see too from that judgment side where it frees them up to allow them to look at things, right, to do the exceptions, right.

And we're going to get into an example, I think down the road, we'll talk a little bit, but it allows them to investigate certain areas that could be potentially like fraud, for example.

Yeah. And it's, it's interesting how I feel like we've talked about this on the podcast before of the separation of duties.

It's almost like having interns in a way. Obviously some interns can build those relationships too, but for the most part, they're not really doing that.

They're more the behind the scenes and doing the little things, repetitive processes just to make our lives a little bit easier.

But that's not even, yeah, but to the extent of in the next three years, I mean, we could see agents from one company interacting with agents from another company to set a meeting or to figure out a specific price.

Probably not that one. That one's still in a negotiation side and maybe a far-fetched dream, but we might see that in the future, which is interesting.

So let's maybe make it real a little bit. Let's picture an accounts payable department three years from now.

What do the employees do? What do the agents do? And what does JD Edwards do?

Yeah. So if we take an example of our, you know, payables agents that we've created, and let's say Susie, for example, is the payables clerk, right?

So what you're going to see the agents do is when an invoice comes in, and that invoice could come in via an, in your email inbox, you could upload the invoice. It could be on a file, a file share, right? And all that.

An agent is going to be able to get a pull. And what's nice is they're going to, the agent's going to pull out all the different line items it needs and then it's going to go ahead and start matching it via two-way or three-way match to the PO receipts, right?

Where before, if you think about that in, in JD Edwards in the screens and we got to talk a little bit about all those steps.

A person, you know, what they're going to get out of doing is actually having to input that invoice into JD Edwards manually, right?

And I'm sure most people if I asked today, that is not a fun process to do, right? It's a tedious manual process that they got to go do right in that.

So what's going to be nice is AP clerks should never have to do that again, right? There's no reason for them to do that, especially with the technology that we're talking here.

So from the human and like you said, great example.

So now Susie, right now I, if I'm Susie, I don't have to do any of this feeding it. I don't have to create, you know, the vouchers are going to get created for everything that matches in there.

However, through that process, the agent's going to find these exceptions potentially, right?

An exception could be a, let's say a duplicate invoice.

The one I like a lot is, hey, there's a different bank account number this month versus last month or there are other invoices that they have.

So that's going to get flagged in an exception, right?

It could find an exception with like freight, you know, typically our freight's within this range, now it's, it's a higher rate. Why is it a higher rate given to us, right?

So those exceptions, let's say there's seven exceptions, will get kicked out.

And that's where Susie now comes into play, right? And Susie's going to take those exceptions.

And now I'm going to research this. Where the judgment kind of comes in, right?

And some of the relationships we talked about here in a minute, but they're going to have to go and go.

No, we understand why the freight was or yes, that seems, you know, out of the ordinary.

So let me call up the vendor. Let me call up and say, hey, why, why is our freight? Let me do the investigation.

I love the, the duplicate bank account or to change the bank account number, right?

Because that's the biggest part for fraud that we see, right?

And where somebody will try to send a fake invoice in or copy an invoice and then put a different bank account so that you pay into that bank account.

Well, now Susie's freed up to go, hey, and the agent's smart enough to, to flag it, right, and send it to Susie and say, now, hey, let's let them go investigate, let them call the financial institution, say, is this correct?

Do you, you know, is that a bank account right, first of all, or go back to the partner and say, did you change your bank account, right?

And honestly get that answer in there.

So, you know, now we're preventing fraud, right, which costs people a lot of money, right?

Those are the meaningful tasks that we can be doing for a business versus just creating the invoice, matching the invoice and doing the things, you know, there's 10, 12, 14 clicks inside of JD Edwards that people usually complain about.

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