Unit4, a Netherlands-headquartered enterprise cloud ERP company that serves professional services, public sector and nonprofit organizations, is giving new and existing ERPx customers access to its full AI capabilities at no cost and with no subscription commitment. Customers who register before December 31, 2026 can use the technology through August 31, 2027, at which point they choose whether to move to a paid subscription or stop. Unit4 has set a fair use cap on the trial but said it is high enough to cover everyday use without hitting limits, removing the risk of unexpected charges during the evaluation period.
The AI capabilities center on Ava, the company's Advanced Virtual Agent, which responds to natural language requests from within Microsoft Teams. Rather than requiring users to switch between applications, Ava surfaces tasks, guidance and data insights inside the collaboration environment most enterprise teams already use daily. The agent covers finance, HR, procurement and project management workflows across the ERPx platform.
Simon Paris, CEO of Unit4, described the rationale behind the commercial structure: "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."
The architecture behind Ava reflects a set of design choices Unit4 has made about how AI should operate inside enterprise ERP. The platform's industry context, built over 40 years of vertical workflow development, is embedded in the system's foundations rather than added as an external layer, which Unit4 argues allows Ava to reason from the meaning of a transaction or process rather than requiring custom configuration to understand it. Every action taken through the AI stays inside governance rules enforced through a policy, threshold and delegation engine, with each action attributable to a named user and reconstructible for audit purposes. Data protection runs through tenant isolation and data residency controls, with no customer data used to train public large language models. The platform is also model-agnostic: the business context layer sits independently of any single AI model, so new capabilities can be added without rebuilding the underlying architecture.
Claus Jepsen, CTO of Unit4, argued that effective AI in the mid-market requires more than a capable model: "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. 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."
Customers who do not register by December 31, 2026 are not eligible for the commitment-free period. Those who do register can stop using the AI capabilities at any point before the August 31, 2027 deadline without obligation.
