Field notes · 14 August 2026 · 6 min read
The 30% your platform never shipped
Every ERP covers roughly seventy per cent of what a business needs. The rest is systems engineering, and it is where the money goes.
Ask any implementation partner what a platform covers out of the box and you will get roughly the same number: seventy per cent. The remaining thirty is configuration, integration, reporting and exception handling — and it is where the second, larger budget goes.
Why it never closes
The thirty per cent is not a backlog. It is the shape of the business: the entity structure, the approval matrix, the way this company recognises revenue, the four exceptions the finance team carries in their heads. A vendor cannot ship it because it is not general.
What changed
What changed is not that AI can now write the configuration. It is that it can operate the systems: log in, read the record, apply the rule, execute, and leave a trail an auditor accepts. The thirty per cent stops being a project and becomes a run.
Next
- 29 July 2026 An agent that reads is a report. An agent that writes is a colleague Read-only agents are safe, useful and stop exactly where the work begins. Here is how we made writing safe instead.
- 2 July 2026 Two weeks, not two quarters What actually happens in the fourteen days between signing and the first live run.
- 11 June 2026 The ledger is the product We spent longer on the record of what the agent did than on the agent.