Acumatica Summit 2026 - Day 1 Keynote (Seattle, WA)

Here are my notes from the Acumatica Summit 2026 Day 1 Keynote in Seattle, Washington. All opinions expressed are mine and mine alone.

Overview of Acumatica Summit 2026

John Case takes the stage to kick off Acumatica Summit 2026.

570,000 square feet in this new location at the Seattle Convention Center. We are here because we needed room to grow. I wonder how many years the contract is for 🤔

That’s a pretty big audience. I wonder how big the attendance is this year.

There are a couple hundred Acumatica Customers in the Seattle area, and a few of their largest Partners are also here.

Seattle is also a place of winners 😂
Did they pay royalties to use that image?

There are endless possibilities for how you can drive performance in every company and in every role.

“Future is here now, ready for you”.

We are in a new era of growth, with AI accelerating decisions, results, and outcomes.

We don’t just want to talk about how technology has the potential to do stuff, but how it can have a real impact today. We don’t want to wait for something in the future, we want to see, learn, and do this here at the Summit.

This is the profile of the mid-market customer that Acumatica is focused on. They will not lose sight of this focus.

Acumatica is an SMB company as well, and they use their own products every day. That’s a key point that I’ve always liked.

Nearly a thousand new features delivered last year. Also, AI Studio was delivered last year and a bunch of other stuff.

Acumatica continues to grow, and here are some numbers to prove it. That last AI number looks interesting, showing that people are actually using AI. The 280,000 daily unique users is also interesting to me because, if Acumatica has around 20,000 customers, then that means there’s an average of 14 users per customer which seems about right to me.

Customers must be having success with Acumatica, otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing these numbers. Personally, I’m thinking that the Acumatica Investors must be salivating over these numbers 🤪

Now for a video where we get to hear from some customers.

Eastman Tire Supplies went from shipping around 30 packages a day with Great Plains to now around 200 packages a day with Acumatica.

TRA Snow and Sun was able to substantially reduce their lead times with Acumatica.

Envent has experienced a dramatic increase in on-time delivery, from around 75% to 95%-100% with Acumatica.

TRA Snow & Sun was able to triple their revenue with Acumatica.

Here’s a snapshot of the results that Acumatica Customers have experienced.

What results are you looking for?

Now Sanket takes the stage with the shiny new word “President” recently added to his title. Congrats on that Sanket!

We are building Acumatica to be a digital replica of your business. Think of it as a “digital twin”.

A digital version of your physical business with all the elements combined: People, Machines, Processes, Materials, and how they are all related together.

The system tells the real story of how business outcomes were achieved, allowing employees of your business to understand what’s happened and why it happened.

Acumatica spans the end-to-end business processes for companies in various industries. Acumatica goes to market with these various industry editions.

Acumatica connects the back office, front office, and field office.

Now Debbie Baldwin on stage to show what this end-to-end experience looks like for a Manufacturing company.

When something fails, most of the time it’s not because of one big thing, but because of a few small things that add up.

Let’s take a Window Manufacturer that just won a really large deal from a Construction Company.

The margin numbers that are shown on the Acumatica dashboard are lower than expected.

We can see that the problem started before production because some glass was broken, and so we are already using more material than we planned.

The plan was to cut the material on the newer machine, but we can see that the material was actually cut on the older machine.

Because we fell behind, we had to expedite the shipping, which caused us to go over in freight costs.

Now we’re able to see the whole story and not be surprised by anything.

Now that we have visibility into the digital replica of the business, we can make decisions earlier to make adjustments to suppliers, machines, and schedules before costs pile up.

Now Sanket back on stage to introduce a customer that we can hear one of these stories from directly, how they mapped Acumatica to their unique business.

Storm Smart has been protecting Florida homes since 1996. Since 2021, they have doubled revenue on their way to $200M, all while maintaining a focus on customer trust and operational excellence. They replaced their homegrown ERP with Acumatica.

Sarah Spangler from Acumatica joins the panel on stage to moderate the discussion.

They’ve done over 100,000 installations in Florida, protecting families and homes.

A lot of their systems weren’t talking to each other. There wasn’t much automation, but rather a lot of manual effort which became a drain on the organization.

They started with 2 branches and now they are up to 7 branches with over 430 employees, covering most of the coast of Florida.

They were very intentional in their approach, looking at all of their manual processes, determining how to fix them and how to bring them into Acumatica.

They also knew that user adoption was important and they needed user champions among their 430 employees. It could not just be the IT department and leadership.

The system needed to be simple and easy to use, with adoption as they pushed it through the company.

About 75% of their people are currently using Acumatica and, when they go live with Manufacturing on February 1st, they will have 90% of their people in Acumatica.

The user champion and change management aspect was really important for their employees to understand that the Acumatica implementation was not to replace their jobs but to make them more efficient and more productive.

Daniel Collins from Strategies Group (their VAR) talking about what Storm Smart did well:

1. They came prepared, with documented current processes and data.

2. They partnered well, bringing the business acumen and pairing it with the Strategies Group Acumatica expertise. They worked together as a cohesive unit.

3. They had the discipline to know that Go Live was not a finish line, but they needed to continue to improve.

A big reason why they selected Acumatica was because of Strategies Group and how they provided one point of expertise, without Storm Smart having to go to many different individuals for expertise in different modules.

Now Jennifer to talk about some examples of automation and how they approached it.

In Acumatica, Automation = Business Events.

They do about 800 jobs per month, so automation in areas like collecting payment from a customer on the job site helps things to move through the system faster.

Acumatica helps the leadership team and the private equity firm that owns Storm Smart because now it’s no longer about guessing about the numbers and debating whose numbers are right. There is one version of the truth.

Piece of advice #1: Do not bring bad data into your new ERP. Start fresh.

Don’t rush. Take your time and document your processes.

Get a project manager who has the tenacity to “herd cats” and document processes 😀

Now John Case is back on stage to announce that Storm Smart is the Acumatica Customer of the Year.

Now let’s turn to the second half of today’s session and look at the changes in the product: how AI and data are helping across so many roles in an organization.

Not only is every Acumatica Customer using the product in a unique way, but each individual User has unique needs.

This is the second Acumatica Summit for Miten Mehta, the Chief Engineering Officer at Acumatica. Dang, I thought he’d been here longer than that.

Interesting concept that AI is not just for your Company, but for your specific Role. Let’s find out if there is some substance here or if it’s just fluffy rhetoric.

It’s not about AI for the sake of AI. ERP and AI are just a means to an end. What matters is how we help you to do your job better, faster, cheaper, and how do we help you to succeed in your business.

Last Summit we saw what they were planning for AI Studio and AI Assistant. AI Studio has already been delivered and we can use the full power of it in Acumatica 2026 R1.

Many people are using anomaly detection in various scenarios or cross-sale recommendations, but there is so much more going on that will help to deliver outcomes in 2026.

Now for a demo of AI Studio.
Yay, a demo!

This scenario is a Salesperson who has many Opportunities that they are working on.

Not really highlighted in the demo, but I like this Activities side panel.

The other side panel is called AI Summary, and clicking on it allows the AI to read all the activities and summarize them.

Here’s the summary, nice and succinct. And it only took a few seconds.

Here’s another example. This time the sentiment is not that great.

Here’s a list of the AI Prompts.

And here is the specific prompt that generated the AI Summary on the Opportunity.

The foreach part in the instructions, this is what instructed it to loop through the activities.

I’m not sure why some words are in bold text. That’s kind of interesting.

Here’s the part of the instructions that triggers the sentiment emoji which is a nice visual effect.

I didn’t capture everything, but here’s the bottom of the instructions (after we scrolled all the way to the bottom) where it covers where to save the AI-generated summary.

For an “AI Newbie” like me, I’m not sure what the difference is between the INSTRUCTIONS on the left-hand side and the PROMPT on the right-hand side.

This demo showed how AI Studio can help a salesperson, but think about how it could help ANY person.

In tomorrow’s keynote, we’ll see more AI Studio in action.

AI Studio was used by the 12 Hackathon teams this past weekend and they were able to deliver various solutions, some without writing any code.

Personally, though I think of the AI Prompt as being code, just like I think of an Excel formula as being code, even though it’s friendly code that you don’t have to be a developer to understand.

These three AI prompt examples are already available out-of-the-box:
1. AI Summary on Opportunity
2. Case Closure Notes
3. Enhancing Product Description

Now let’s talk about AI Assistant which we can use out-of-the-box in Acumatica 2026 R1.

The AI Assistant button is in the upper right-hand corner.

I like how we can ask it anything, but I like even more that it gives us 3 suggestions that we can easily click on.

Miten asked it for the 5 most profitable items.

First, it shows the list of items.

Then it shows the chart.

Then it shows the data in a Pivot Table.

And finally, it shows some follow-up questions that we can ask.

Now we’re asking for the details of the last sales order involving an Acer laptop item.

Here AI shows us the information.

It even gives a little recap of the order at the bottom in a sentence.

Now let’s ask it to show us what inventory is available in the warehouses.

It only took a few seconds to come back with a response.

Personally, though, I’m wondering how many tokens it burned through because that translates to how much it cost in dollars.

Now let’s ask it for the shipment details of a specific order number.

That’s a nice little summary. I especially like how it shows that it was processed 2 days after the order date.

Tomorrow we are going to see how we can use MPC Server to get this information on-the-go using our mobile device.

Now John Case comes back on stage and recommends that we ask ourselves if we are taking advantage of everything that is in the solution today.

What Acumatica is focused on delivering in 2026.
That Enhanced Reporting and Insights blurb looks interesting.

Acumatica now works with over 500 partners around the world.

Highlighting their partnerships with ADP, Shopify, Bill.com, and Avalara.

Two new announcements:

1. Acumatica completed the acquisition of corechain

2. New partner relationship with avidxchange for payments.

Both of these will drive better experience and cost for Acumatica customers.

Everything we are showing you is to help you drive impact today.

Now introducing PSI Family Services, a cornerstone of support for communities in the Washington DC and Maryland area. A community-based non-profit.

Shary Dye from Acumatica on stage to moderate the discussion.

PSI is:
1. Person Centered
2. Strength Based
3. Focused on helping people grow

They are reimbursed for their services and things changed from a volume-based funding to a highly specific fee-driven reimbursement.

They were working with a legacy system that needed constant patching and was expensive to maintain.

We needed insight, not just back-office accounting.

When David and team first engaged with PSI, it became very clear to them that it was a complicated environment with government funding and healthcare compliance, all while delivering deeply human services.

We needed to harness the flexibility of Acumatica to bring forth a solution that was going to be a confluence of 3 things:

1. Easy to use

2. Seamlessly integrate with claims engine

3. Not require a big increase in Finance & Admin headcount in order to grow the organization

Acumatica is our Financial Truth Engine.

We can finally reconcile our clinical effort with the financial reality.

Reimbursements can lag up to a year so it’s important that we can now see the true cost of care by program in near real-time.

Acumatica has allowed us to make informed decisions without compromising care.

In Maryland, they have achieved a 68% positive discharge rate in foster care over the past 2 fiscal years.

In Washington DC that number is 80%.

Founder Quote: “When you’re classified by your limitations, rather than your talents or your strengths, it weakens your sense of self and the value you place on your own life.”

Technology should never, ever overshadow mission. It should strengthen it.

Even small improvements and tweaks, when they’re aligned to the purpose, can make a real difference.