Not if every manufacturing company in the world decided to use your software anyway.

ERP rollouts can "fail" for lots of reasons that aren't to do with the software. They are usually business failures. Mostly, companies end up spending so much on trying to endlessly customize it to their idiosyncratic workflows that they exceed their project budgets and abandon the effort. In really bad cases like Birmingham they go live before actually finishing setup, and then lose control of their books and have to resort to hiring people to do the admin manually.

There's a saying about SAP: at some point gaining competitive advantage in manufacturing/retail became all about who could make SAP deployment a success.

This is no different to many other IT projects, most of them fail too. I think people who have never worked in an enterprise context don't realize that; it's not like working in the tech sector. In the tech industry if a project fails, it's probably because it was too ambitious and the tech itself just didn't work well. Or it was a startup whose tech worked, but they couldn't find PMF. But in normal, mature, profitable non-tech businesses a staggering number of business automation projects just fail for social or business reasons.

AI deployments inside companies are going to be like that. The tech works. The business side problems are where the failures are going to happen. Reasons will include:

• Not really knowing what they want the AI to do.

• No way to measure improved productivity, so no way to decide if the API spend is worth it.

• Concluding the only way to get a return is entirely replace people with AI and then having to re-hire them because the AI can't handle the last 5% of the work.

• Non-tech executives doing deals to use models or tech stacks that aren't the right kind or good enough.

etc