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Sage Future 2026 centered on three themes: explainable AI for finance teams, faster ERP implementations via the Doyen AI acquisition, and new partner development tools through Sage Agent Builder.
As a Sage Partner, we have attended this conference for many years. This one was different. The announcements were sharper, the product roadmap was more concrete, and the conversation around AI moved past the hype into something our clients can act on. Here is what we are taking back to our teams.
Sage is closing the AI trust gap through glass box AI (explainable, auditable outputs) and a joint initiative with PwC called 'Beyond the Black Box.’
The headline moment from the Main Stage was not a product launch. It was a number. Research shows that seven in ten finance leaders will reject AI outputs they cannot explain, and finance professionals are spending an average of 12.9 hours every week reconstructing, validating and defending AI outputs. As a result, 26% of time savings from AI are lost to this reconstruction, verification and explanation work, meaning a lack of transparency does not remove labor, it shifts it into explanatory work that slows scale. This was further announced in Sage’s press release.
That is a problem we see with our own clients every day. Sage's answer is what they call glass box AI, a design approach where every AI output includes an auditable explanation of how it was reached, so finance leaders can defend it to auditors and stakeholders. Sage and PwC announced their "Beyond the Black Box" initiative, combining their expertise into practical tools and frameworks to help finance teams understand, assess, and adopt AI responsibly, embedding trust into how AI is implemented in finance environments.
For Blytheco prospects and clients, this is the permission structure they have been waiting for.
Swisher argued that AI adoption will be dictated by how people feel about it, and that the technology needs to demystify itself to help people understand how it can serve them.
Guest speaker and veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher brought an important counterpoint to the AI conversation.
She pushed back on the idea that AI should be positioned as a replacement, emphasizing instead the importance of keeping humans at the center of consequential decisions. Swisher noted that "big voices" in the valley have been allowed to operate with limited regulation, leading to a loss of public trust in the technologies.
As partners, this reinforced something we tell clients constantly: adoption is a people problem before it is a technology problem.
Sage acquired Doyen AI, and it matters for implementations. This announcement landed on Day 1 and it is directly relevant to our work. Sage acquired Doyen AI, a company focused on using AI to make customer onboarding and implementation faster, simpler and more accurate for finance teams, strengthening its AI and innovation strategy by expanding its ability to deliver AI-powered implementations that help customers go live faster while maintaining accuracy, auditability and control.
ERP migrations have always been the implementation step that kills timelines and overruns budgets, so reducing the data-mapping window from weeks to days is the kind of concrete capability customers feel. For a partner firm, faster and more accurate migrations mean better client outcomes and fewer escalations.
Sage Agent Builder opens a new door for Partners. Sage unveiled new AI development tools at Sage Future in San Francisco, including Sage Agent Builder and the AI Gateway, giving partners a more structured way to design, test and deploy AI-powered experiences within Sage workflows, including Sage Copilot and Sage Marketplace. The update introduces a more unified developer experience across Sage Intacct, giving partners a clearer way to build once, integrate more easily and bring solutions to market faster.
This is a significant shift. Partners now have the tools to build differentiated, certified AI agents rather than relying solely on what Sage ships out of the box. The opportunity for firms with vertical expertise, in construction, nonprofit, healthcare, and beyond, is substantial.
Sage HCM, formerly Criterion, now becomes the go-to HCM solution for all Sage Intacct customers, regardless of company size, and the integration goes deeper than a rebranding.
Sage highlighted integration with Sage HCM to give customers more visibility into labor spending, along with new receivables features intended to support more predictable cash flow management. For clients where payroll is their largest and most variable cost, connecting workforce data directly into Intacct financials is a meaningful upgrade.
Sage now processes 406 million monthly model inference requests and operates 17,000 customers on the Sage AI Factory, running their own customer-specific Sage models. The Sage AI factory is Sage's infrastructure for training and running customer-specific AI models tailored to each organization's own financial data.
The scale of Sage's AI footprint is larger than most realize. Numbers shared at the conference put the platform's AI activity in context.
These are not pilot numbers. The platform is in active production at scale, and that gives our clients confidence that they are building on something durable.
Our Takeaway
Sage Future 2026 gave us a clearer picture of where the platform is going and, more importantly, what our clients need to do to keep up. The glass box AI commitment, the Doyen AI acquisition, and the new partner development tools all point in the same direction: Sage is building for practitioners who need results they can explain, implement, and defend.
We left San Francisco with a full action list. If you want to talk through what any of these announcements mean for your organization, we are ready to help. Contact Blytheco to discuss next steps for your business.
Linda joined Blytheco after spending more than 8 years on the Sage Intacct team. During her thirty-four years in technology, Linda has worked as a technology reseller for multiple software publishers. No matter the job, her passion is providing value through service to others.
