Short answer
AI is moving ERP from a system you feed data into toward a system that drafts the reconciliation, flags the exception and answers questions in plain language. That means agencies can get more out of a lean finance team if they buy carefully and keep control of their data.
Almost every vendor demo I sit through now has an AI section, and some of it is genuinely useful, like agents that propose journal entries or reconciliations for a person to approve, or a chat window where a budget analyst can ask for spending by fund and department without building a report. Newer AI-native ERPs in the private sector are promising implementations in weeks rather than years, and I think that pressure is going to reach public sector vendors like Tyler, Workday and Oracle faster than many people expect. The way to win here is to ask every vendor to show you the AI working on your own data in a demo, to find out which model it runs on and whether you can change it later, and to put language in the contract that keeps your data yours and out of anyone's training set. We write about this every week on the Start at Zero Substack, and subscribing is the easiest way to keep up.