The ERP Implementation Work Is Getting Automated, and Investors Are Funding It. That Is the Best Argument for Senior Judgment I Have Seen All Year.
Two funding rounds crossed my desk this week that I think every Dynamics and NetSuite professional should pay attention to, even though neither company directly touches our stack.
Conduct, a two-year-old London startup, raised a $60 million Series A to ingest enterprise system code, configurations, and integrations, map the underlying business logic, and generate the code, tests, and changes needed to modify complex IT systems. The round was co-led by Index Ventures and Iconiq, and SAP itself was among the investors. Around the same time, Qorelo raised a seed round to automate SAP ERP upgrade and migration workstreams, with the explicit goal of shortening project timelines and reducing reliance on manual delivery teams.
This is something different in my opinion. These are not productivity tools that help a consultant work faster. They are aimed at the work itself; the configuration, the migration, the test scripts, the change management that has historically been billed by the hour and staffed by rooms full of people.
I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying AI is about to replace your implementation team, and I most certainly do not want to get on the AI fear-mongering train!
What I am saying is that the routine, repeatable layer of ERP delivery is now an investment thesis with real money behind it, and SAP writing a check into a company built to automate that layer tells you the platform vendors see it too. When the incumbents fund the thing that compresses their own ecosystem’s billable hours, that is not noise; that is a signal about where the value is moving.
So where does the value move? This is the case I have been making for a while now, and these rounds are the clearest evidence I have seen for it.
If software can ingest a system and generate the configuration, then keystrokes stop being scarce. What stays scarce and what becomes more valuable is the judgment that determines whether the configuration is correct in the first place. Someone has to know that the way you model intercompany eliminations in NetSuite has downstream consequences at consolidation. Someone has to know that a D365 Finance and Operations design decision made for one entity will quietly break a process for another. Someone has to sit between the CFO who wants an outcome and the system that will or will not deliver it, and translate in both directions. No model I have seen does that, and the ones being funded this week are not trying to.
That is what I mean when I say cross-stack fluency is the new premium. The person who only knew how to execute one configuration task is exactly the person whose work is now an addressable market for a venture-backed startup. The person who understands finance, operations, and technical architecture well enough to make a defensible design call across all three becomes harder to replace every time one of these tools ships.
For the partner and VAR firms I work with, I think this reframes the hiring question entirely. The instinct during a tighter market is to hire cheaper hands for the routine work. I would argue the opposite. Routine work is precisely the work most exposed to automation, so the smart investment is in senior people whose value lies in their judgment. You are not just hiring for the project in front of you; you are hiring for the part of the work that software is least likely to take.
If you are a Dynamics or NetSuite partner thinking about what your bench should look like two years from now, this is the conversation to have now, before market forces force it. I would genuinely enjoy helping you think it through. Reach out and let’s map it together!