Acumatica’s 2025 R1 brings a range of new features and technological advancements that will transform the way businesses use Acumatica Cloud ERP and its associated industry editions. R1 was the star of Acumatica’s Summit 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada, which was the first to showcase this release and other innovations from across the Acumatica community. Shawn Windle, EAG’s Founder and Managing Principal, and Rebekah McCabe, EAG’s Digital Marketing Manager, attended Summit 2025 to provide a firsthand look at 2025 R1 and provide their view on what customers can REALLY expect from Acumatica in the new year.
When announcing the release, Acumatica placed an emphasis on the future of ERP, highlighting increases in competition, customer expectations, technological advancements, and global economic trends. These factors informed their product strategy for 2025 while still building on Acumatica’s mission to address and provide solutions for everyday business obstacles.
Driving innovation in 2025 will be Acumatica’s “AI-first” product strategy. At its core, 2025 R1 revolves around the practical application of AI in day-to-day business operations. Executive leadership also took customer feedback seriously in 2024 by gathering information directly from users about the business problems they faced every day. Those problems were the foundation on which Acumatica’s 2025 R1 was built.
When asked about Acumatica's approach for their strategy in 2025, John Case, Acumatica CEO, said:
“Our customers are interested in Acumatica working on things that will actually solve problems for them. They are asking for pragmatic solutions, and Acumatica is responding with new AI-driven features. That means delivering assistance capabilities which is AI helping them get answers faster. Coming soon, we will be able to put automation into our tools and solutions to do automated tasks for them. Down the line, we will be able to deliver ERP that is more human-like -- digital co-workers to help perform key tasks. As we innovate, Acumatica is going to continue to use and leverage AI technologies and models to solve problems for customers in a pragmatic way.”
All in all, 2025 R1 represents a holistic improvement to the Acumatica product by offering new functionality across Acumatica’s entire stack of technology and service offerings.
Acumatica’s Day 2 keynote speakers put a large emphasis on the importance of AI and its impact on 2025 R1. Acumatica sees AI as most other ERP software vendors do: the future of ERP. Their approach to AI in 2025 involves not only adding AI tools to existing solutions but embedding tools directly into their platform. By doing so, Acumatica AI could become an “out-of-the-box” feature, not an add-on. Acumatica is using AI to transform the way we solve business problems from the ground up.
Miten Mehta, Chief Engineering Officer at Acumatica, spoke about the AI releases in 2025 R1 at Summit. With UI enhancements in the works, Acumatica provided a live demonstration of their AI assistant.
AI is growing away from simple data retrieval by enhancing capabilities for data summarization, data analysis leading to actionable insights, and tools for customer interaction. By utilizing order tracking and data available in the system, Acumatica’s AI assistant will be able to write status reports and provide accurate updates to customers waiting on products or services. Additionally, users will be able to analyze the information provided by the AI assistant to identify bottlenecks in the delivery process and address opportunities for improvement backed by real data.
Looking forward into the future of Acumatica’s AI offerings, they announced the ongoing development of AI agents and AI Studio. AI Studio will change how customers interface with analytics tools by providing more intuitive ways to pull and analyze internal and external data. Previously, it has been difficult to easily analyze external data due to a lack of integrations, resources, or structural differences within the systems. This release would represent a milestone in improving business intelligence by helping to eliminate those roadblocks.
Customers can also expect to use AI studio to configure AI tools within their systems, without the need for complex coding. By doing so, customers can design functionality more seamlessly to meeting industry and business specific needs.
Additionally, AI agents will begin to emerge in 2025, even though they are not expected in 2025 R1. Advancements in AI will create tools acting as “agents” for the business. These agents will be empowered with data and a holistic view of the business to ultimately act autonomously and make important business decisions. For now, these agents probably won’t be running your organization but could provide you will key suggestions for improving business operations. As technology continues to advance, we have a lot to look forward to!
In February 2024, Acumatica released their “Principles of Innovation,” a strategy for how the platform will continue to develop and utilize AI in an ethical and responsible fashion. The team doubled down on this at the Summit, promising security as a top priority for them when implementing new uses of AI.
Jeff Smits, Chief Information Officer, spoke at the summit about security and reliability, and what they mean to Acumatica through the age of AI. A core piece was the guarantee that customer data would not be shared with public Large Language Model databases and assurance of full customer control and ownership of data. Acumatica is also actively utilizing regular 3rd party data security checks, allowing outside sources to attack the system in an effort to audit the system and identify any shortcomings.
At the end of the day, AI tools will only ever be as strong as its data source. Acumatica’s devotion to data security and system maintenance will help ensure your business’ data is ready to deliver.
Maintenance downtime is a major inconvenience and can negatively impact your business. Acumatica announced plans to utilize AI to monitor customer activity and business productivity in order to avoid scheduling upgrades on the busiest days. These solutions will minimize unplanned downtime to an hour a year and provide the most efficient upgrade schedule possible. No more disruptive system downtimes!
Alongside other next generation of maintenance initiatives, Acumatica also plans to apply AI in customization maintenance and testing through major upgrades. In many cases, businesses with heavy customizations in their ERP find their functionality broken as the system updates. Acumatica will use AI to track customizations through the upgrade process, validate them after the fact, and if one breaks, point out what caused the error and provide a solution to fix it.
Acumatica Labs, a new customer driven innovation platform, was spotlighted on Day 1 of Summit. Acumatica Labs aims to gracefully formalize feature testing and adoption processes outside of the product.
Through this platform, customers can safely access new features early in order to test the functionality and provide feedback directly to Acumatica. This hands-on approach gives customers a say in platform enhancements and future product releases. Early adopters of Acumatica Labs can expect immediate access to:
Acumatica also boasted the release of Acumatica AI Studio to revolutionize the way customers interface with Acumatica’s system. This AI-powered tool will provide customers with a low-code, no-code way of automating complex workflows while empowering customers to do more with their data. Acumatica AI Studio will allow customers to pull actionable insights from their data in a secure environment.
Beyond these impressive standalone releases, Acumatica launched functionality across its suite of industry-specific solutions.
Acumatica’s Distribution Edition received functionality geared toward distributors selling unique products. New attributes for tracking product inventory and orders were prioritized, catering to businesses selling items in need of more than generic SKUs. Categorizing products through characteristics like lot and serial attributes will empower distributors with greater price and catalog control while eliminating time-consuming manual processes.
The beta release of Acumatica Manufacturing Edition 2025 R1 was announced on Day 2 of Acumatica Summit 2025 and brings innovative functionality and scheduling views to manufacturers. Through advanced planning tools and new scheduling views, specifically the work center schedule, customers on Acumatica’s Manufacturing Edition can expect greater visibility and control over their scheduling needs. This release was developed based on customer demand and Acumatica promises to deliver even more schedule views in the new year. New scheduling views provide deeper insight into resource allocation, productivity, and overall capacity for improved efficiency and delivery.
Also provided in this new system is a real-time view of material availability throughout the production lifecycle. Customers will be able to view unscheduled and scheduled production orders to monitor health, address bottlenecks, and improve time to delivery. On top of that, customers will also be able to create and save their own product features to better categorize and track materials.
Construction is core to Acumatica’s offerings, so it was no surprise this edition received the most enhancements in 2025 R1. In 2024, Acumatica had over 400,000 daily field reports going through the system, equating to over a million change events. This demonstrates just how important Acumatica is within the construction space.
Before even discussing releases made in R1, Acumatica announced strategic partnerships with JobPlanner and STACK Construction Technologies to enhance the Construction Edition.
JobPlanner is a collaborative project management solution. Working in tandem with Acumatica’s platform, JobPlanner will help contractors, “streamline their workflows, enhance communication, and achieve project goals more efficiently,” according to JobPlanner CEO DeWayne Adamson.
Alternatively, STACK, a cloud-based construction software platform, will integrate advanced takeoff and estimating capabilities to the Construction Edition to assist in labor and material requirements calculations and improve project cost forecasting.
2025 R1 is packed with releases for the Construction Edition. Acumatica focused on improving processes to further connect the main system with workers in the field. They kicked off the announcement with Progress Proforma project billing enhancements, offering customers the opportunity to “draft” project progress. Through Progress Proforma, customers will be able to summarize project progress in order to track what is really going on in the field, deliver more accurate bills to clients and vendors, breakdown billable objects based on cost, and tie plant and machinery into billing role. Ultimately, Construction Edition users will receive greater accounting insights with this enhancement. Additionally, new project information in AP documentation and collaboration tools will ensure construction customers are getting the most from their ERP.
The Retail Edition received the least attention in 2025 R1, but with the enhancement that was made, customers can expect a more seamless experience between Acumatica and Shopify. The two expanded their partnership to improve the integration, connecting online storefronts to backend operations in a single ecosystem.
Acumatica Professional Services Edition was the bell of the ball at Acumatica Summit 2024, ultimately being released last summer. Acumatica Summit 2025 highlighted the already significant success the product has achieved, with over 250 customers using the Professional Services Edition as of January 2025.
This edition was created from the ground up to open an entirely new channel of expansion within the Acumatica ecosystem. Real-time integrations and robust project management capabilities are already available. This is in part due to Acumatica’s VARs partnering with the vendor to develop the product using their industry specializations and experiences. The biggest news around Acumatica’s Professional Services Edition was the native ProjectManager integration built for improved resource planning and project scheduling. This is only the beginning for Acumatica’s professional services journey.
Acumatica Summit 2025 didn’t disappoint, delivering exciting news and updates about the platform’s future after a pivotal 2024. With new AI advancements on the way and industry-specialized developments, Acumatica is looking to have a strong 2025. The value expected in 2025 R1 promises to be monumental for Acumatica.
A special thank you to Acumatica for hosting ERP Advisors Group and to Blytheco and Kensium for providing their expertise in our interviews.
If you are considering Acumatica, or any other ERP vendor, schedule a free consultation with us today!