HOW AI IS QUIETLY REWIRING THE CAMPUS ERP

ERP · AI · Higher Education

Ask a CFO or registrar what they think of when they hear “ERP” and you’ll usually get a wince before you get an answer. Banner, Workday, and PeopleSoft have never had a reputation for being exciting. They’re the systems that run payroll, registration, and financial aid disbursement correctly and invisibly, right up until they don’t. What’s changed in the last eighteen months isn’t that these platforms became exciting — it’s that the AI layer vendors have been quietly building into them is starting to touch the parts of the job that used to require a small army of analysts: forecasting, reconciliation, anomaly detection, and increasingly, answering questions in plain language instead of a report builder.

Workday’s Bet: Agents Embedded in the Workflow, Not Bolted On

Workday has been the most aggressive of the major platforms about naming and shipping specific AI agents rather than talking about “AI” as a vague feature. At Workday Rising in September 2025, the company expanded its Illuminate agent collection with additions built specifically for finance, including a Cost & Profitability Agent, a Financial Close Agent, and a Financial Test Agent, alongside HR-focused agents like a Business Process Copilot and an Employee Sentiment Agent (Workday, 2025). For a university finance office, the practical version of this shows up in things like automated variance explanations during month-end close, or a forecasting model that flags a budget line trending off pattern before a controller would have caught it manually. Workday has also built machine learning directly into its planning and budgeting tools for demand forecasting, cash flow prediction, and churn-risk scoring, which for a college translates most directly into enrollment-linked revenue forecasting (ERP Research, 2026).

Banner and PeopleSoft: A Slower, More Cautious Path

Ellucian’s Banner and Oracle’s PeopleSoft Campus Solutions haven’t moved at the same pace, and for institutions running either one, that’s not entirely a bad thing. Both platforms carry decades of customization at individual campuses, and bolting a forecasting agent onto a heavily modified Banner instance is a genuinely harder engineering problem than doing the same on a newer, more standardized cloud platform. Ellucian has focused more of its recent AI investment on Ethos, its data integration layer, using it as the plumbing that lets AI tools reason across student, financial, and HR data that used to live in separate silos rather than shipping flashy agents directly inside Banner itself. Oracle, for its part, has kept PeopleSoft Campus Solutions supported for the long haul while its cloud-native AI investment goes mostly toward Oracle’s broader ERP Cloud line, which leaves PeopleSoft-heavy campuses choosing between incremental AI add-ons and a longer-term migration conversation (Full Fabric, 2026).

Where This Actually Saves Time Today

Strip away the marketing language and the real, current use cases cluster around four things. Natural-language reporting lets a budget director type a plain question instead of building a query, and get back a chart along with an explanation of what moved and why. Anomaly detection flags a duplicate vendor payment or an out-of-pattern reimbursement before it clears, instead of surfacing it in an audit six months later. Enrollment and revenue forecasting blends historical registration patterns with softer signals — application volume, deposit rates, even macro indicators like regional demographic trends — to give enrollment management a moving forecast instead of a single number set in September. And intelligent process automation handles the genuinely tedious reconciliation work — matching purchase orders to invoices, flagging mismatched account codes — that used to eat a junior accountant’s whole week.

The Part Institutions Keep Underestimating: Data Quality

None of this works if the underlying data is a mess, and at a lot of institutions, it still is. Duplicate vendor records, inconsistent chart-of-accounts coding across departments, and years of manual workarounds baked into local processes all quietly degrade whatever an AI layer tries to do on top of them. The institutions seeing real value from AI-enhanced ERP right now are, almost without exception, the ones that did unglamorous data cleanup work first — standardizing account structures, reconciling duplicate constituent records, documenting what each customization actually does — before turning on a forecasting or anomaly detection feature. Skipping that step doesn’t make the AI fail loudly; it makes it fail quietly, producing forecasts and flags that look plausible but are built on bad inputs, which is arguably worse.

What to Ask a Vendor Before You Buy the AI Add-On

A few questions separate institutions that get value from AI-enhanced ERP modules from institutions that end up with an expensive dashboard nobody trusts. Where does the model’s training data come from, and does it include our institution’s own history, or only a generic cross-client benchmark? What happens when the model is wrong, and how visible is that error to the staff member relying on it? Does the feature require a specific edition or a separate licensing tier, since several vendors gate their newer AI modules behind add-on pricing rather than including them in a base subscription? And critically, who on staff actually understands what the model is doing well enough to catch it when it drifts. That last one is the question institutions skip most often, and the one that causes the most trouble a year later.

Beidat LLC helps colleges and universities evaluate and implement ERP and AI initiatives, from data readiness work to vendor selection to post-go-live support. If your institution is weighing an AI module inside Banner, Workday, or PeopleSoft, reach out at support@beidat.com or 888.384.1992.

References

ERP Research. (2026). Workday business intelligence: Capabilities & review. https://www.erpresearch.com/erp/workday/business-intelligence

Full Fabric. (2026). 10 best ERP systems for higher education in 2026. https://www.fullfabric.com/articles/best-erp-systems-higher-education-2026

Workday. (2025, September 16). Workday Illuminate expands with new AI agents for HR, finance, and industry. Workday Newsroom. https://newsroom.workday.com/2025-09-16-Workday-Illuminate-TM-Expands-with-New-AI-Agents-for-HR,-Finance,-and-Industry

Last updated on August 15, 2026