Sage Partner Summit Recap: AI was the Talk of the Town

The DataBlend team spent three days learning, connecting, and networking with Sage Intacct, Sage Intacct VAR and SIAP Partners, and other Sage Intacct Tech Partners at the Sage Partner Summit. DataBlend was a Gold Sponsor at the conference.

DataBlend is the leader in Sage Intacct integrations because of our robust experience with Sage Intacct and its focus on Finance departmental needs. More of our clients use DataBlend’s Sage Intacct connector than any other.

Automation and Generative AI were the talks of the town at the Sage Partner Summit. AI and automation naturally piqued our interest, given what DataBlend does. Sage CTO Aaron Harris’ keynote was fascinating and one of our best sessions. He had high-level thoughts about Generative AI and how Sage applies them to their investment priorities. For example, they want to elevate human work and use technology to create trust but remain aware of how to be socially and environmentally responsible.

Aaron stated that generative AI would impact 10-to-50% of work tasks for 80% of the US workforce. Occupations with the most significant opportunities are accountants, tax preparers, business analysts, and mathematicians.

Aaron outlined the following should be next for people with AI:

• Use generative AI to increase personal productivity.
• Your employees are likely already using generative AI, so establish sage use guidelines.
• Explore skills like Prompt Engineering to improve your use of generative AI.
•  Use generative AI to learn new skills.

Several other sessions discussed AI or automation and its impact on many industry verticals. Automation has the power to assist operations with controlled distribution processes, including approval processes, simple and automated communication with vendors and customers through workflows, and detailed inventory tracking and traceability. To name a few.

Outsourced accounting is having a moment right now. There was a considerable presence from Sage Intacct’s Accountant Program (SIAP) at the event. Michael Cerami from CPA.com shared that four non-Big 4 firms are now, each billing over 1B annually for outsourcing. 

Here are some statistics to consider:

• The Finance and Accounting outsourcing market ended 2022 with 10% year-on-year growth. That double-digit expansion is forecast to continue over the next several years.
• Mature buyers are now open to leveraging third-party support across more complex, judgment-intensive processes, with 65% of successful organizations including outsourcers in their delivery models.
• 71% of financial service executives outsource one or more services.
• 70% of organizations plan to outsource more work shortly.
•  Finance leaders consider 89% of accounting activities highly automatable.
•  “Standardization and process efficiency” ranked as the top outsourcing objective in 2021, ahead of cost savings (#2).
• 61% of organizations said geopolitical world events like COVID accelerated their digital transformation efforts.

Another key takeaway from the Summit was directly from our Senior Director of Revenue, Andrew McDonnell.

“Despite being in sales for almost 15 years, my belief system was shattered when I attended the Psychology of Sales and Rob Johnson proved it’s not a sales funnel. Why? Because a funnel runs on gravity, and if sales were “gravity” easy, salespeople are not needed. He stated that if you invert the funnel and consider it a cone (I think a pyramid is more accurate), a good salesperson will help your prospect climb up the cone, and the top of the funnel = the bottom of the cone. I liked his belief that “how we sell is how we solve,” so don’t tell your prospect you will send them a proposal on a certain day unless you send it on that day. His implication was if you are late with your proposals during the sales, your prospect might think your firm will be late solving their problems when they become a customer.”

Lastly, we asked our CEO, David Furth, and Senior Director, Strategic Alliances, Adam Rakich, for some of takeaways from people they spoke to. They said:

• Integration is vital to our partners and their customers. It is more than integration; it is process automation that drives value!
• In technology companies, great products count, but people matter. We heard repeatedly about how great it is working with DataBlend. That is HUGE and should mean a lot to everyone here.
• iPaaS is elevating its presence in the tech stack – Sage sees its role in connecting its customers’ technology, but so does almost every company we spoke to. The people we talked to were curious, not just being polite!
• There was a larger European presence than last year. It is really positive and shows a lot of potential!

“We have a lot of work in front of us on the product front to keep up with our competition, but we are “minding the gap” by hustling, out servicing our competition!”