Unit4 gives mid-market businesses free access to AI capabilities
Unit4 is launching its ‘AI for your World’ initiative, which will give new and existing customers access to its AI capabilities with no contractual commitment until the end of August 2027. The initiative is designed to encourage mid-market firms – who otherwise might struggle with affordability – to experiment with AI.
As part of AI for Your World, customers will have access to its ‘Advanced Virtual Agent’ (named Ava), which responds to natural language requests through tools such as Microsoft Teams, bringing tasks to users and providing guidance and insights without the need to switch applications. The AI capabilities will work across the whole Unit4 ERPx platform, covering finance, HR and people, procurement and project management processes. Customers will have full access to Unit4’s AI tools with a generous fair use cap, set high enough to enable everyday use without exceeding the limit, meaning there are no surprise costs.
“The mid-market has always been an engine of growth for economies around the world, and we want to help build a new generation of AI-enabled mid-market champions,” said Simon Paris, CEO of Unit4. “The “AI for Your World” initiative underlines our commitment to helping our customers experiment with AI functionality without concerns about contractual obligations. We believe this commitment-free approach will be a trigger to accelerate innovation and productivity, giving teams time back for the work that matters most.”
Unit4 says it believes this will empower the mid-market to “harness AI for innovation, reduction of manual, repetitive tasks, improve decision-making and build tangible business use cases for AI”. After a sign-up period until the end of 2026, the initiative will now run until 31st August 2027 – after which, customers can either move to a subscription for Unit4’s AI capabilities or stop using the technology.
The Unit4 approach to AI which is at the heart of the initiative is built around four principles, according to the firm. ‘Designed for your world’ puts the firm’s 40 years of industry context to use, to deliver services built into their foundations, not bolted on. ‘You stay in control’ meanwhile means governance is built into the architecture, with every action stays inside a client’s own rules, enforced by a policy, threshold and delegation engine.
‘It gets smarter over time’ comes in as Unit4’s ERPx learns the more it is involved in tasks, so every cycle (engagement, grant, term, payroll) feeds the model, per-tenant and in-jurisdiction – before Ava orchestrates agents across finance, projects and people for one co-ordinated view and vertical pattern recognition ensures problems surface early. Finally, ‘Built for what’s next’ means that since AI is constantly evolving, Unit4 has designed its approach to be model agnostic – enabling new capabilities to plug in, instead of forcing a rebuild.
“AI will only be effective for mid-market organisations if it is embedded in an intelligent core that is fluent in the language of our customers’ industries,” added Claus Jepsen, CTO of Unit4. “They have a head start using our AI with ERPx because it has been designed with their needs in mind. It becomes smarter the more involved it gets in work, ensuring institutional memory lives in the system and accelerates productivity. It is auditable and data is protected so our customers can be confident of compliance with regulatory frameworks, and it is model-agnostic to avoid lock-in to one LLM approach.”
