Australian enterprise software leader TechnologyOne on Thursday unveiled its new agentic AI system, promising governments, councils and university customers a new ability to instantly exploit troves of data with a few sentences.
The new ‘PLUS’ platform predicts, learns and uncovers insights from the enterprise through a natural language interface, the company told its customers and investors, breaking cover on years of research and development.
The agentic AI capability is also being rolled out to TechOne’s 19 individual products like business analytics, budgeting human resources and financials.
The new AI capability will be free for exiting customers up to a monthly limit of “interactions” — when the AI is triggered in the existing products — and a larger cap for the “conversations” in the all new PLUS platform. The simple system is designed to remove the confusion of AI tokens, the units of data measured by AI that can quickly sprawl from simple prompts.
PLUS will initially offer 1,000 conversations per month without additional charge while 200 interactions will be free each month for the individual products.
‘Watershed moment’: Technology One chief Ed Chung says his agentic AI software will be a step change for public sector customers. Image: Supplied
A live demo of the enterprise-wide PLUS platform showed how it could pull up information about job candidates from a customer’s enterprise resource planning system and provide summaries based on their resume data.
It then goes further with a breakdown and comparison of candidates, as well as interview packs with personalised questions for an interview. But in-built ‘human in the loop’ guardrails from TechOne stop it making a hiring recommendation.
Other examples showed universities breaking down funding revenues, and TechOne also expects its council and government customers will be able to significantly speed up tasks like work and leave requests.
Step change
The Brisbane company has dabbled with AI to analyse images and expense reports but until now had not integrated agentic AI across its flagship offerings that receive biannual updates.
It says it was willing to let competitors go first to ensure its offering could be developed with customers and governance like an AI ISO certification was in place.
TechOne is one of only two ERP companies worldwide and the only ASX50 with the ISO 42001:2023 certification, the world’s first global standard for Artificial Intelligent Management Systems.
“We’re much more slow and steady wins the race… What you see here with PLUS is two years of working in the background,” chief operating officer Stuart MacDonald told InnovationAus.com.
“We really believe in waiting until it is right but also getting validation through the market before we go to mass [deployment].”
The company is bullish on the efficiencies its clients will be able to generate and expects it to help peel away customers from global giants like Oracle and SAP.
“Our industry, all we’ve done for 40 years is get data into a table and try to get data back out of a table. It didn’t matter if it was on prem or SaaS or the cloud or client server, it was all just different technologies to do the exact same thing,” Mr MacDonald said.
“What you see here is a step change. You don’t have to worry about any of that [data location]. It’s giving you analysis of the next step, it’s giving you not only your data back but the direction of where it should go. That’s the material change.”
The new PLUS platform is an example of the benefits of inhouse innovation and working with customers, Mr MacDonald said, and arrives as policymakers weigh new weight to encourage business investment in R&D.
“Our marketing budget is the coffee budget of Oracle. And we’re proud of that. We want people to see our product and [then] the product sells itself,” Mr MacDonald said.
“We’re not trying to be all things to all people. We’re trying to let our software speak for itself and be the growth engine of the business. That’s why we put the money back into [the R&D].”
TechOne chief executive Ed Ching said the solutions released Thursday are the culmination of nearly 40 years of work for the Brisbane company.
“This is a watershed moment in enterprise software,” Mr Chung said.
“PLUS redefines how organisations operate. By connecting enterprise-wide data, PLUS anticipates needs, designs solutions, and delivers results that enable organisations to adapt with unprecedented speed and precision. It creates valuable time for communities to work more productively and sustainably.”
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