Epicor Expands AI Offerings, Launches Carbon Cost Rollup for Sustainability
Carbon Tracker may not fly in the US under Trump, but analyst calls it a ‘welcome step’ from a sustainability tracking perspective.
Epicor this week launched a series of new AI initiatives at its Epicor Insights 2025 user conference, and, in in a move that likely will not sit well with the Trump administration, also introduced a patent-pending offering called Carbon Cost Rollup that it said will help businesses “work toward sustainability goals without compromising profitability.”
On the AI front, Epicor announced the general availability of enhancements to Epicor Prism, a network of vertical AI agents designed for supply chain industries, as well as new predictive machine learning (ML) capabilities in its Grow AI, a predictive AI modeling engine, which runs on the firm’s Grow Data Platform.
Kerrie Jordan, group VP, product management at Epicor, said in an interview Thursday, “we didn’t want to be the company that goes to market with AI for the sake of AI. It was really important to us that we focused in on specific use cases that would resonate and actually really solve tough problems for our customers.”
AI, she said, is no longer a vision or science experiment, but is delivering real results. According to a release, examples of that include fast-tracking employee onboarding with the help of AI agents, streamlining information retrieval, and enhancing decision making through rapid visual analysis of charts, metrics, orders, and lists; Epicor AI agents then collaborate to suggest parts, suppliers, costs, and delivery schedules. This cuts down communication by up to 40%, the company said.
Carbon Cost Rollup, the company said, “establishes ‘Cost Rollup’ methods from standard costing systems. Adapting this concept transforms carbon tracking by treating CO2 emissions as a currency, helping business leaders to calculate their compliance reporting to a high degree of certainty.”
Jordan said Epicor understands that “there are long term sustainability initiatives that need to be put in place now for future resilience and creating value. And we have a lot of interest specifically on this carbon costs rollup solution from our international manufacturers, many of them who were here at our customer conference, and very excited about the new release to help them measure and accurately report, as they need to report on Scope One, Two and Three emissions.”
Yaz Palanichamy, senior advisory analyst at Info-Tech Research Group, said, “the newly unveiled carbon tracker functionality offering entitled Carbon Cost Rollup featured in Epicor’s Kinetic platform (part of Epicor’s Industry ERP Cloud) aims to treat emissions like currency.”
‘Quite timely’
“The organizational benefits of implementing such a tool are quite timely given the current industry environment,” he said. “As we know, many global organizations in the manufacturing and supply chain sector are aiming to reduce their carbon emissions, assess the holistic environmental impact of their supply chain operations, and be more purposeful with respect to their internal ESG emissions compliance reporting practices.”
Palanichamy added, “one positive aspect of this new carbon cost rollup feature is the ease with which complex carbon calculations can be greatly simplified in scope. Moreover, such a feature can also help integrate seamlessly with existing carbon footprint calculation APIs that can streamline manufacturing organizations’ attainment of their target sustainability and ESG reporting goals without compromising on their bottom line.”
The deployment, he said, “is a welcome step in the right direction from a sustainability tracking perspective for manufacturing-based organizations. However, there is still the overarching concern of how the absence of stringent federal mandates and guidelines will impact the deployment of such a tool, and what that means for both private and public sectors’ ability to drive progressive-thinking sustainability agendas in their respective organizations.”
And while there is merit for organizations to implement the carbon cost rollup for joint sustainability and ESG reporting purposes, the “relationship between the American political rhetoric and its influence on governing the usage of such a carbon tracking solution cannot be undermined.”
Therefore, he said, “it is advised and understandable that we need to assess the current political climate in the US and understand exactly how the political and regulatory framework will affect the ongoing discourse surrounding climate change disclosures and ESG reporting policies, thereby analyzing the underlying factors that influence investor behavior.”
Doing so, said Palanichamy, will provide much-needed clarity for large enterprise vendors such as Epicor to help them navigate the fallout from any stringent guardrails brought forth by political mandates, and let them better ascertain any undue political influence affecting Carbon Cost Rollup.
