Discover why today’s AI-enabled ERP must focus on safety, and explore how the practice of Safety By Design helps you find the right ERP for your needs.

In digital products, there has been a long-standing, unspoken conflict between safety and novelty. The digital industry, more than any other, values Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra, “move fast and break things.”

However, even Zuckerberg realized a few years ago that neglecting safety brings consequences — and when it comes to AI-enabled business software solutions, those consequences can be devastating.

It has become increasingly clear that safety is the primary concern when investing in a modern ERP. Since your ERP handles all your most sensitive business data and you cannot manage your business’s finances without it, any good ERP vendor should consider “Safety By Design” to be the backbone of their AI strategy.

What Is Safety By Design?

It is by no means a new idea to focus on product safety. Surely the Wright brothers and Henry Ford recognized the importance of safety as a core design component early on, knowing that mass-market sales would only be achieved if prospects trusted their products.

However, the concept of considering data safety is a new idea.

As digital products and AI have begun to dominate the landscape, they have given rise to a new research area devoted to studying and optimizing safety in the SaaS industry. It is called Safety by Design (SBD).

According to top Safety By Design experts Tomomichi Amano and Tomomi Tanaka, in their Harvard Business Review article, “Balancing Digital Safety and Innovation”, “safety must not be an add-on but a fundamental product feature.”

They propose a 3-step model companies can use to make sure they adhere to the principles of SBD:

1. Align organizational priorities around safety.
2. Embed safety considerations into product development processes.
3. Foster continuous user engagement and feedback to improve.

To ensure that your data is handled safely in an AI-enabled ERP, you should verify that your vendor follows this model.

How to Determine Your ERP Vendor’s Safety Priorities

So far, so clear. But how can you determine if an ERP vendor adheres to this model? Amano and Tanaka suggest that you look out for a few key tells:

The company will emphasize safety as a core priority and incorporate it into their mission and values.

As an example, Acumatica Cloud ERP explicitly addresses security in their Customer Bill of Rights, clarifying that they offer “a complete security model that covers your application access, data, reports, and devices.” Other systems typically only cover application security, which can put your data at risk.

Also, at their most recent user conference, they introduced their AI-First Product Strategy by first focusing on their AI’s safety. Leadership at the company stressed their commitment to using native, private LLMs (large language models, which power chatbots) and they explicitly stated how this impacts your AI safety: Your data remains compliant, encrypted, and isolated from public training models. With Acumatica, your business data will never be in a public LLM.

Note: Accounting Business Solutions specializes in Acumatica Cloud ERP. Since that is what we know, that is what we draw our examples from. However, we encourage you to apply these points to any ERP you are researching.

The company will be able to point to specific tools and design choices that uphold their priorities.

Acumatica aims to empower customers to enhance performance with secure, valuable AI solutions that analyze business data in real-time. However, they know that data analysis only works if all the data is available and integrated. Therefore, their core AI offerings include methods for customers to securely and safely bring data into Acumatica from external sources and third-party AI tools.

Then, once a business has the complete picture of their data at hand, they can leverage Acumatica’s:

• Intelligent Advisor, which offers deep insights, often with actionable advice, in real time.
• Interactive Assistant, which engages and empowers all users with a human-like, generative interface that answers questions about the data and creates accurate, on-the-fly visualizations with drill-down capabilities.
• AI Automation, which instantly identifies anomalies and categorizes critical business data, reducing manual work.

The company will address potential safety issues proactively, instead of releasing a feature and waiting to see how it is exploited.

Right now, it seems that everyone is developing their own GPT engine to address highly specific business needs. Acumatica recognizes that your company will likely want to do this as well, and they are excited to support your innovation and help drive your efficiency. However, they want to ensure that you do not inadvertently compromise your business data by doing so.

Instead of waiting for customers to build their own potentially unsecured GPT engines to manipulate business data, Acumatica proactively created the AI Studio, which empowers Acumatica users to safely and securely develop their own AI capabilities and workflows tailored to their unique company needs.

The company provides systems that continuously monitor vulnerabilities. Risk assessment is not seen as a one-time event, but an ongoing commitment to product safety.

It is well-known in the ERP world that Acumatica delivers business resilience. Now, they have crafted AI that extends their commitment to resilience.

At their most recent user conference, their leadership team highlighted new, built-in AI capabilities for the Acumatica xRP platform. The AI runs constantly in the background, checking customizations for known errors so you can maximize uptime and optimize system performance effortlessly.

Focus on Safety, But Do Not Neglect Novelty

Of course, when working with AI, an ERP vendor cannot solely focus on safety. The genie is out of the bottle for AI-enabled business processes, and your organization deserves to have an equal share in the transformative power of the impressive AI advances currently sweeping the world.

When choosing a new ERP, ensure your vendor offers the desirable, cutting-edge AI capabilities you prefer. But do not put your business’s future at risk: make sure that any new and exciting AI technology a vendor offers can be proven to keep your data safe as well as fully under your control and ownership.

If you are considering an AI-enabled ERP or other business tech solution and the vendor does not clearly indicate their commitment to Safety By Design principles, ensure that you assess the solution’s potential risks before using it at all.

Not sure how to assess risk in such a new industry? Harvard Business Review’s experts offer help here, too. They suggest that you ask and answer these baseline questions before moving forward:

• What is the risk?
• What are the consequences if the risk is not addressed?
• What is the likelihood of the risk?

Only after analyzing your answers to these questions should you or your staff seriously consider any AI-enabled business tool.

Get More Facts — Discover Acumatica’s AI-First Product Strategy

 

Accounting Business Solutions is a respected accounting and business management software solution provider. We provide experienced sales, consulting, implementation, training and support services for small to medium-sized companies located in south central and southeast Texas. Our portfolio of solutions includes cloud based, hosted and on-premises options.

 

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Sources

Business Insider. “Mark Zuckerberg on Innovation.” 2009. https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-innovation-2009-10

Business Insider. “Mark Zuckerberg Explains Why Facebook Doesn’t ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Anymore.” 2014. https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-on-facebooks-new-motto-2014-5

Harvard Business Review. “Balancing Digital Safety and Innovation.” 2025. https://hbr.org/2025/05/balancing-digital-safety-and-innovation

Acumatica.com. “Customer Bill of Rights.” 2019 (updated 2023). https://www.acumatica.com/blog/customer-bill-of-rights/