Leaders in ERP: Aaron Harris, Global CTO, Sage

Introduction:  This is the ERP Advisor. 

Shawn Windle:  Welcome, everybody. This is Shawn Windle with ERP Advisors Group, and I'm glad that you could join us for another one of our series in ERP leaders. And we are very honored today to have Aaron Harris from Sage. Aaron, I'd love for you to introduce yourself, tell us your official title, and maybe a little bit about yourself, and then we'll jump into some of the questions. 

Aaron Harris:  Yeah, thanks, Shawn. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. So yeah, Aaron Harris, I'm the global CTO for Sage. That essentially means I've got responsibility for setting the long-term technology vision and direction of the company. And I get quite close to the teams that are working on the more exciting futuristic bits of the strategy. So, I have a bit of a dream job. I've been doing the same thing for more than 25 years now. I was a co-founder of a company called Intacct, which I don't know, maybe some listeners will be familiar with, CTO and head of engineering there until Sage acquired us a little over seven years ago. And I've been doing the same job ever since. Now I just work for all of Sage, not just Intacct. 

Shawn Windle:  Fantastic. Okay, great. So, you've got some decades under your experience here. So, looking forward to hearing a little bit more about that. And I'd love to start off too, for our listeners to really understand more about Sage itself too. So, you're really one of the largest suppliers of ERP for businesses globally, with millions of customers, maybe two and a half million. Can you give us just a little bit of Sage's history and kind of that like overview of the company? 

Aaron Harris:  So Sage was founded in, I think it was 1981, in Newcastle, England. So, Newcastle is on the east coast, just south of the Scotland border. And it was founded by a University of Newcastle professor in partnership with a student. And for some reason, a NASA engineer who was seconded to the university for some period of time. And they were drinking beers in a pub as Jordy's, we call Jordy's, the people from Newcastle in that part of England. And they were talking about some of the problems of business and particularly invoicing customers. And that sort of got them going on building PC software for initially invoicing, but then eventually doing accounting. And they were pretty wildly successful. The company grew very, very quickly. They went public on the London Stock Exchange, I think 1988, maybe 1989. The fact checkers may come in here after this and correct that. And I think what's interesting about Sage is that most people have heard of Sage, but they hear of Sage through different pieces of Sage. Not a lot of people know the entirety of Sage. So, Sage does focus entirely on back office business software. The biggest category of software that we focus on is accounting, but we also have payroll solutions, HR management, anything within the office of the CFO, as we call it. We have a lot of solutions there, AP automation, AR automation. We have manufacturing software, construction software, but it's sort of all the business operations. It's a very global business. So, as I said, we're traded on the London Stock Exchange. The UK is our second largest market. Our largest market is in the US. Sage entered the US market in the late '90s when it acquired Peachtree. Some of the more experienced listeners like me will recall Peachtree, which, by the way, is still very much alive and is a great product. Sage acquired Timberline. If you're in the construction industry, Timberline is a household name. They acquired the MAS line of products, right? So, Sage has become very, very prolific, I guess, in the US market, culminating with the acquisition of Intacct in 2017, which was its largest ever acquisition. So just to kind of wrap things up, we're in North America, we're in continental Europe. The UK and then South Africa and Australia are pretty good markets for us as well. 

Shawn Windle:  Perfect. Okay, so I mean really a global company from the get-go. Not just from a UK perspective, but really across the world, which I think it's a big differentiator for you guys. You kind of, have grown up through lots of challenges on enterprise software internationally with taxation, localization. There's a lot of stuff that you guys have been dealing with for a long time. 

Aaron Harris:  We have a lot of wonky people in the company. You know, I sort of joke about all the nerds and compliance nerds in the company. You know, when I was working at Intacct as the head of product and engineering there, I always viewed Sage, who was a competitor, as the very disciplined, professional, kind of the adults in the room. These were the pros who knew accounting and compliance. And so, yeah, I mean, that's just core to the DNA. 

Shawn Windle:  That's awesome. Well, and it gets to the next point I did want to ask is kind of related. How are you all uniquely positioned against your customers? 

Aaron Harris:  Yeah, I mean, I think it all starts with our focus. I talked about, all the wonks in the company. There's 11,000 of us. There's a lot of crossover in our experience with the accounting industry, a lot of crossover and experience with the parts of the industry that support small businesses and medium-sized businesses. But fundamentally, if you look at a product like Intacct, Sage Intacct, there is a maniacal focus on the CFO. It's all about the CFO's need, the CFO's team's needs. And that is translated into the roadmap. It's translated into sort of the language used in the products. It's translated into where we focus on innovation. There's just kind of this relentless focus on that really sets us apart. So, I think that's a big piece of it. I think we're probably the largest software company in the world that exclusively focuses on the accounting industry, or the accounting profession, if you will. We're also really unique in the range of customers that we can support in terms of the size of the business. We have products in the UK and other parts of Europe that are built for sole proprietors, you know, micro businesses. Over in Europe, digital compliance is a big deal. And so even if you're a landlord with one property, you still have some requirements to digitally file business taxes. So, we support very small businesses on that end, all the way up to quite large businesses within our Intacct portfolio, within our Sage X3 franchise, very large publicly traded businesses. We've got that range of company size that we can support as well. And I think the last thing that I would say there is that Sage is a company that people like to work with and for. We made a decision pretty early on at Intacct, and we had synergy with Sage that sort of helped with the acquisition. We made this decision early on that we wanted to be the good guys. Because our competitors were a bit mercenary. They didn't have the best reputation for treating customers with respect and dignity. There were some practices that we didn't feel were terribly ethical. And so, we, I would like to think it's just in our DNA anyway, and certainly having these principles attracts that kind of person. But we decided that we want to be a good company to work with. And I think that that's been a really good principle for us over the years. 

Shawn Windle:  Yeah. I think in our experience, I would say that, when we've worked with Sage and with our clients, that I think it's actually the name, right? I think you all provide kind of a sage advice on accounting finance in this area. You know, really, really like top notch, like we've talked about world class. And. 

Aaron Harris:  And it's humans, right? We've got a human support team in New Castle, England, in Atlanta, Georgia, in San Jose, California. You can always get to a human. And a lot of other software companies are under this sort of relentless pressure to cut back on those types of expenses, either by offshoring, going to low-cost markets, or getting rid of it entirely. And we've held true to this belief that our customers are going to want to talk to a human who understands them and their business, right? And a deep understanding of the industry and the software. So that's been really key to the way we've run the business over the years. 

Shawn Windle:  Okay, now that's awesome. Well, maybe can you tell us a little bit about, I mean, again, having such a vast product catalog, what do you expect from a product roadmap perspective kind of going forward? Do you all continue your focus on sort of top-notch, world-class focus on the office of the CFO? Do we go deeper in some other areas or what do you think about that? 

Aaron Harris:  Yeah, so what one area of investment is what we call the office of the CFO. And that's essentially software that automates any of the workflows that the CFO has responsibility for. So yes, it's finances and it's accounting and compliance. But it's also accounts payable automation, accounts receivable automation, expense management, FP&A, elements of procurement and spend management, sort of anything in that world or sphere that the CFO has responsibility for is going to be an area of investment for us. We have several products where the operational user is very important. So, whether it's manufacturing or construction, they're probably the best examples of that. Where we're going to spend more on enabling the execution of a project or the operations of a shop floor, lots of focus there. There's a number of industries that we focus on. that we will continue to build more and more capabilities for technology companies or service-enabled technology companies, nonprofits, financial services, hospitality. I'm going to miss a bunch of them. But we have teams focused on the big verticals where we continue to add more and more capabilities. And then, we'll talk about more about this, I suppose, but we're doing a heck of a lot with AI. We've got about 4,000 developers in the organization, and a really good chunk of those developers are working on AI capabilities, whether it's task-based AI for doing very specific things all the way to AI agents that can take on whole workflows. 

Shawn Windle:  Awesome. Tell us a little bit more about that, for sure, around your AI. And I'm curious, too, with the agentic environment, what does that really mean to the office of the CFO, the controller who's banging out the books and trying to get things done by the fifth day after the month end close? 

Aaron Harris:  Yeah, so I think a key philosophy here is what we call authentic intelligence. This idea that there's so much hype surrounding AI. that it's often hard for an accountant or a CFO to see through the hype to get to what's real, what has real value, to technology that they can trust. And so, the first principle always is, we're not building AI for AI's sake. We are solving real problems that need to be solved. And we're doing that with AI. And the AI, for many years, has been in our products, but it's been very specifically focused. Reading an invoice, analyzing a transaction for errors, predicting when a customer is going to pay. We've got dozens and dozens of models that we've developed for doing these very specific things. And we've had them in products for years now. What agentic AI enables is for us to now take these bits of AI that are sort of embedded within the software, AI kind of rises up to the surface and becomes something that humans can interact with and give instruction to or ask questions of where the AI can now take on bigger responsibilities with less oversight. So instead of AI that just can read an invoice, AI that can shepherd an invoice from being received, being processed, categorized, approved, paid, reconciled, and bring a human in if there's a need to make a critical decision or review an exception. So, agents fundamentally change the level of automation and the sort of the required human oversight. What it also does, though, is it creates new and more natural ways of interacting with technology. So, one of the sad but inevitable facts of accounting softwares is the bigger the company that's using the software gets, the less likely the CFO is to use that software. So, if we can build ways that empower CFOs to get what they want without having to go to their team, that's a huge win. And we think we can do that with agentic AI. The flip side is, accounting teams spend a lot of their time and resources supporting the rest of the business, helping department leaders understand budget versus actual, or chasing an employee to approve a purchase order. Getting those employees to interact with traditional ERP software is kind of hard, especially if they don't do it very often. And so, it's sort of the same story there. We believe we can use Agentic AI to engage the rest of the business so that they're able to both help themselves but also take some of the burden off the accounting team on all these accounting and financial workflows that depend on the rest of the business. 

Shawn Windle:  It makes a ton of sense. I think as you're talking, I'm kind of thinking back through, I guess I've got about the same amount of time in the industry as you. There was an effort early on to extract logic out of databases. Database triggers. I know some team teams are still building those to you guys. I say thank you for keeping that rolling. We love the goodies. 

Aaron Harris:  The amount of money debugging that kind of stuff. 

Shawn Windle:  Yeah, that might be their full-time jobs for the rest of our lives. That's great, but that's still good. But as we're bringing out now AI, layering it out of the application closer to the user, so the interaction is more human-based. I mean, it really, I can't not think about the matrix, and I'm a tech guy like you, and I shouldn't think that, but the AI says, what do you need today, Mr. Anderson? But like, this is real. I think that's one thing we saw at one of your recent conferences that we went to, we appreciated being able to go, was there were real applications for people that sometimes our clients and the folks that listen to this, they're a little worried about their jobs, like, my gosh, what am I going to do? And then they see these agents and they're like, whoa, I can do the real stuff. Like, is that what you guys see with your customers? 

Aaron Harris:  Yeah, that's the big promise. So, I have a bachelor's degree in accounting. And when you go through an accounting program, and I suppose it's probably evolved some since I did this, but you're trained to be that strategic advisor to a business. You're trained to have the special set of skills for understanding the finance, the numbers, the macros, right? You're trained to be uniquely skilled at understanding risk. And you get into the actual work of accounting, and you're not doing that, right? You're making sure that vendors get paid and you're making sure the financial reports get out at the end of the month. And you're making sure the taxes get filed, and you spend so much time on the, you know, what I call the repetitive low value, but nevertheless non-negotiable work, right? You can't decide you're not going to pay the vendors this week because you have to evaluate an acquisition, right? Like that's not a decision you can make, right? The acquisition is just going to, you know what? We'll miss that opportunity because I don't have the resources to put on that. So we absolutely believe that AI can, on the one hand, take on more and more and more of that repetitive, low value, but nevertheless non-negotiable work, freeing up time to do the more strategically valuable work while also empowering accountants to be more effective, to do better, more high-quality work when they're working on those more strategic things. And I would add to that two things that I think are pretty critical. First is there's a major shortage of trained accountants. You know, the last time I put a slide up on this, it was like 200,000 vacancies for accountants and auditors. And there's a looming retirement crisis coming. When the baby boomers retire, they represent a big, big chunk of trained accountants today, and that's going to be an issue. So, this is also going to help with this looming shortage of trained accountants. I think, frankly, that it's going to make it a more attractive profession. Work-life balance should improve when you're not under the gun to get the taxes filed or to get the books closed, right? When technology can level out some of those peak periods. So, for all kinds of reasons, we see the industry becoming more valuable, not less valuable as a result of AI. I do kind of want to add one more thing to this. AI is never going to sign an audit report. And what I mean by that is the more we invest in technology that automates this work, and especially AI, that can be a bit unpredictable, the more we're going to value the humans who assure us in the accuracy, the reliability, the trustworthiness of the numbers and what's happening in the business. And so, I think we're only going to value, we're only going to value, trained accountants more in the future. 

Shawn Windle:  Yeah. Yeah, I think one point I would add to that too, Aaron, from what we see is the value of, I mean, enterprise technology, enterprise applications from the beginning, from the 50s and the 60s, and helping people to do their jobs better. We really view AI the same, right, where it really is just the next evolution. But If we can keep the cost of the AI solutions down, which I think you guys do a really good job of, very effective pricing for the market that you're selling into, that the enablement that people are actually getting from it, really is like, it's life-changing. I mean, how many of our clients, as they're going through these implementations, they're like, we've got all kinds of stuff happen, right? And as we have more AI, not just for the end user, but also even through the implementation methodology and more system set up through what makes sense, it's almost just like what makes sense for this next evolution of what we're going towards. So, we appreciate a lot of the work you guys are doing there. So, speaking of sort of looking forward a little bit here, as we entered the second-half of 2025 with new releases, you guys have a great ecosystem. You're a major part of the broader ERP market. What do you look forward to going into 2025 and then the next couple of years going into that four-year tsunami of the silver tsunami like I've got? 

Aaron Harris:  I'm way ahead of you. 

Shawn Windle:  I don't know. 

Aaron Harris:  So, and I just sort of have to remind people that I'm a CTO, so the technology gets me excited. There's two things that I'm very excited about. The first is something that's happening in Europe. that will come later in the US. And that is in Europe, more and more business is happening on digital networks. Businesses are invoicing each other digitally. Compliance is happening sort of continuously and digitally. In some cases, governments are mandating this and they're themselves investing in these networks. In some cases, it's happening more organically. But what that's doing is it's driving pretty rapid digital transformation of business in Europe. And one of the roles that we're playing is operating these networks that allow businesses to communicate directly with each other. So, issuing an invoice from one product, and it shows up instantly and accurately in your customer's product, right? Pretty game-changing. The way I like to describe it is AI that can take a scanned invoice and read it with like 95% accuracy is awesome. What's even better is if you never have to scan the invoice in the 1st place and you don't need AI to read it because it's been digital for men's end, right? So, I'm very excited about what's happening in Europe with these digital networks. It will come to the US. We're seeing some efforts to create these networks in the US, and we're seeing some traction. The second thing, which was going to be no surprise to anybody, is I'm very, very excited about the arrival of AI agents. And I mean that from two directions. So, the first is that we, of course, are building our own AI agents. These agents, the brains in these agents, are large language models that we train ourselves. So, they're experts on accounting, they're experts on our products. We take advantage of relationships like what we have with the AICPA. We train their professional literature into these models. And, you know, they do the things that CFOs and finance teams want to do, right? So, I've been deluged by demos of these AI agents across our portfolio over the last couple of weeks. So, it's really, really exciting what's coming there. But what I would also, the other side of that is that we want our products to be great platforms for AI agents, meaning if you're going to use your own agents that you've developed, or that you've configured on a third-party platform, we're not going to be one of those big software vendors that tries to block you. We're not going to be one of those software vendors that tries to totally throttle you and charge exorbitant fees to keep these agents out. We want to embrace it, right? Because we know where the future is. Like, we know what's coming. And so, our decision is to embrace the future, make sure that our platforms are sort of the trustworthy, not just trustworthy, but they're sort of designed to be used by agents with the tools that agents need to be effective. So, both angles, right? The agents that we develop with the AI that we're developing, but also, building out capabilities to enable third-party agents to be effective and secure and, to operate in trustworthy ways on our solutions. Love it. 

Shawn Windle:  Yeah, in the 90s, I think it was, I had worked a little bit of a research project with one of the ERP vendors that I was with at that time on the Semantic Web. It was this concept from Tim Berners-Lee, of course, the founder of the World Wide Web. And it was this idea of basically bots, agents working together where the semantics of business were so well defined that that interaction could just occur. And that's exactly what you're talking about is happening with these networks in Europe. That's fantastic. And you guys probably getting a little bit of a leg up on that from practical experience than being able to bring that out globally. That's pretty exciting. 

Aaron Harris:  Yeah, we're big believers, and they work together, right? AI is most effective when it can use digital tools, right? So, agents that can operate over networks of connected businesses are going to be the most effective agents. 

Shawn Windle:  Now, that's amazing. Well, while we look forward and see a lot of promise and things even today that are happening with you all, we also have a lot of customers that are on legacy solutions. And especially for those folks and maybe even others, but what do you think is, for those that are out there that are waiting to see where things are heading over the next few years, why is now the right time to make the leap to modern technology? 

Aaron Harris:  So, it sort of goes back to what I said about, agents, operating with digital tools. If you want to succeed in the future, you're going to have to embrace AI. For AI to succeed in your organization, that AI needs to be able to digitally access your infrastructure, right? Your data, the interfaces to your workflow, the ways you collaborate with your employees. And so all of the urgency for businesses to digitally transform the way they work, are not only still true, but they're more true now. Because AI can leverage all of that work to be far more effective. And I think we all need to be a bit honest about the AI revolution, that there will be disruption, there will be winners, and unfortunately, there will be some losers. The winners will be the organizations that are, have a good foundation of digital technology that they use to run their businesses, that they've got, great collaboration in place with their, digital collaboration in place with their employees. Their data is sort of well maintained, well understood, secured and accessible. these companies are already sort of winning with AI, they'll just become even more successful. 

Shawn Windle:  Love it. Aaron. I feel like we've done an incredible job of kind of going around the world, getting our anchor points out around the office of the CFO from continent to continent, as well as looking forward. And even in the past, right, I think you all have such a phenomenal legacy customer base, people that are on these really strong applications have been there for years. And I see you have a roadmap for them. And I think this might sound kind of strange coming from me, but we really appreciate that a lot because as we're talking to clients, they really need to know that there is a future out there. And when people can, again, put their attention on where we're going and kind of oversee the effort of making that conversion from maybe the on-prem, the customized system to going in the cloud, I know you all offer a lot of different deployment models. It's really exciting. I'm excited to work more with you guys and to see kind of what's coming through. But before we wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to say to our listeners? 

Aaron Harris:  You know, I think the thing that I would leave everyone with is just the importance of trust in the world of AI. And there's lots of dimensions to trust. But we've learned through the surveys and the research we've done with customers that trust has the biggest barrier to adopting AI. People want to know that their data is secure and kept private. They want to know that the AI is developed in ways where sort of bias and ethical concerns are mitigated. People want to know that, you know, when they hand a responsibility over to AI, it's going to be competent, all right, in the way that it gets the job done. And so, you know, this needs to drive a different behavior from, you know, large technology companies like Sage. And so I guess the thing that I would, I would leave with everybody is that, as you look to embrace AI and to bring it into your organizations, having that trusted relationship with your partners, like ERP Advisor Group, your software vendors like Sage is more important than ever. 

Shawn Windle:  Yep, love it. Aaron, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. 

Aaron Harris:  Thanks for having me.