Sage reveals vision for its Agentic AI Era to Boost SMB Productivity

Sage, a leader in accounting, payroll and HR software for small and mid-sized businesses, today announced its vision for artificial intelligence at its flagship event, Sage Future. Building on nearly a decade of embedded AI automation, Sage led the industry's adoption of generative AI with its productivity assistant Sage Copilot. It is now positioned to bring the potential of agentic AI and autonomous agents to SMBs in a third wave of innovation.

With demand for intelligent automation rising, Sage is already delivering billions of AI-powered predictions a year through tools like Sage Copilot. Now available to more than 40,000 customers worldwide, Sage Copilot has already helped businesses save time, improve accuracy and drive efficiencies.

Now, Sage is positioned to amplify the productivity gains and decision-making gains for SMBs by unlocking the potential of the next wave of AI. Unveiling the next phase of its AI strategy, the roadmap shows how Sage is building on its AI heritage, into the generative AI of today and expanding into the emerging space of Agentic AI.

“AI is already transforming how small and mid-sized businesses operate, and because automation has been part of our products for nearly a decade, we’re building on a foundation our customers already trust,” said Aaron Harris, Chief Technology Officer at Sage. “We’re not just delivering generative intelligence, we’re making sure that intelligence scales across workflows, and we’re building toward autonomous capabilities that can support smarter, faster, more confident decision-making.”

The Waves of AI

Designed to help customers move forward with confidence, Sage’s AI is delivering real value today, building smarter tools for tomorrow, and exploring what’s next.

• Wave 1 – Task-based AI: Sage began its AI journey by delivering productivity gains with intelligent automation. The early models focused on performing specific tasks reliably, such as anomaly detection and invoice classification. Many customers will have experienced this through features built directly into products like Sage Intacct, where AI improves accuracy and efficiency behind the scenes.
• Wave 2 - Generative AI: Through Sage Copilot, customers are using generative AI to discover insights, analyze financial information, and speed up processes like the month-end close. Features like Copilot Close are already delivering measurable time savings and improving confidence in financial data.
• Wave 3 – Agentic AI: Agentic AI is all about systems that can coordinate tasks, make reasoned decisions, coordinate tasks, and take actions with minimal direct human interaction. It builds on earlier waves by reducing manual steps and moving toward greater autonomy, while keeping the user in control. This wave will come in two surges:
  
  • Agentic Applications (Emerging): Sage’s next generation of AI agents will orchestrate complex workflows across systems. In early use cases, customers can ask natural language questions like “What caused the drop in Q2 revenue?” and receive grounded, contextual answers, powered by retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and multi-agent coordination.
  • Autonomous Agents (In testing): The most advanced wave in Sage’s current strategy focuses on agents with true autonomy: systems that can detect business risks, initiate multi-step responses, and communicate with other agents to resolve issues proactively. These capabilities are already in early-stage testing and are expected to reach customers over the next 12–36 months.

“While agentic AI represents a new phase in the evolution of enterprise applications, it is essential for vendors to ensure that its deployment addresses real-world challenges and delivers tangible benefits to users,” said Ashok Patel, Research Manager, IDC. “Sage’s roadmap reflects a measured, phased approach to embracing agentic AI in ways grounded in the practical needs of small and medium-sized businesses. The vendor is embedding this technology into business workflows and processes, while maintaining a clear emphasis on transparency and trust—principles that are central to responsible AI adoption.”

Delivering at scale

To bring this strategy to life, Sage isn’t just embedding AI into products, it’s transforming how products are built in the first place. By giving developers access to shared frameworks, smart tooling, and built-in guardrails, Sage is accelerating innovation without compromising trust.

Key enablers include:

• Sage AI Factory - Secure, self-contained environments that automate AI model training, deployment, and operations for both network-scale and customer-bespoke deployments.
• Domain-Specific Models - fine-tuned AI models trained on deep expertise in accounting, payroll, and compliance.
• Sage Copilot Framework - a development framework that makes it faster and easier to build and deploy Sage Copilot experiences that work seamlessly across products.

To find out more about Sage’s AI visit: Sage Ai | Sage UK

To find out more about the Sage Platform visit: A conversation with Walid Abu-Hadba: Accelerating innovation with the Sage platform I Sage UK

Disclosures
Content within this feature, including graphic illustrations, has been adapted from source materials provided by Sage (USA) for the Sage Future conference. This includes content supplied by Axicom, the Burson Tech Specialist Agency, on behalf of Sage. Referenced source materials and content appearing within this Insightful Accountant feature are used with permission and are provided solely for educational and informational purposes.
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