CHICAGO—Manufacturing ERP software provider Syspro showcased its new industrial AI platform here that the company said can work with any ERP to help manufacturers improve operations.    

Company officials said at IMTS 2026 Sept. 14-19 that the platform, Torque, aims to help their customers address challenges in their ERP systems. Users can describe what they need an agent to do within a chat feature in Torque, and the platform can build that agent, without the need for manual coding, according to Syspro.  

Podcast: Scaling AI won't fix a shaky ERP foundation 

The platform can work with any ERP and combine that context with order, inventory, production schedule, supplier and shop floor data already in the ERP. It can also connect to MES, SCADA and warehouse systems already on the floor. 

Around 94% of manufacturing organizations are using some form of AI as adoption expands beyond automation and into predictive, generative, and connected applications despite supply chain uncertainties and implementation challenges or outright failures, according to one survey. 

Despite the spending and adoption, most AI remains in experimentation or piloting stages, and failure rates are high. According to reporting by Smart Industry, 70% to 85% of Gen-AI deployments fail to deliver their intended ROI, which is double the already-high failure rate of traditional IT projects. 

See also: How data, governance and organizational change define AI success

Syspro is launching Torque amid these challenges. 

Company leaders said that they followed a “glass-house” principle when developing Torque, focused on giving manufacturers the greatest amount of visibility as companies continue to adopt AI.   

“When we think about the small and medium-size manufacturing base, with trusting and adopting AI, I think there's some reservations there,” Dan Abramson, senior VP of Americas at Syspro, told Smart Industry at IMTS. “What we think about is, how do we help our customers leverage the tool and move up the maturity curve when it comes to AI?”  

Creed Grimm, VP of pre-sales at Syspro, said another aspect of Torque that makes it different from other platforms is the degree of completeness that it offers customers. 

“We talk a lot about the AI maturity curve, and so we can help customers that are wanting to have information served up for them about how to make better procurement decisions, but they don't want an agent to go make those purchases by themselves. We can meet them where they are." 

See also: Study sees AI 'maturity gap,' finds companies lack capacity to implement agents 

Grimm added that, for manufacturers, Torque provides insights for users across systems such as inventory and production, which he said allows companies to focus more on customer satisfaction.  

“A fantastic use case with Torque is identifying if there was one batch of bad material that was used, [finding] where it went, and Torque serves that up to the user, and that's cutting out the process of manually generating reports,” Grimm said. The platform can then provide actionable steps to address the problem.  

“These are all very manual processes, but this is one single workflow that's catching those at all of these different steps in all of these different places,” Grimm said. 

Abramson highlighted that the company is launching Torque as manufacturing companies across industries jump into implementations that often come with uncertainty. Scaling AI platforms, using the correct data and ensuring ROI are top concerns for manufacturers, he said, and Torque aims to give users more certainty when developing their own agents.   

See also: Survey: AI adoption continues apace, despite uncertainties and failure risk 

Additionally, global trends such as labor shortages, tariffs and supply chain uncertainties make the landscape even more uncertain for manufacturing companies, which Abramson said is part of their emphasis on visibility.   

Torque provides manufacturers with an upfront cost estimate for each workflow before it runs, sets the cadence that fits their operation, and tracks what each agent delivers, according to Syspro.   

“The glass-house aspect of it is that whether it's the trust, the governance, [or] the decisions behind the AI, we expose all of that to our customers, so understanding who made a decision, how much a workflow costs from a tokens and credit standpoint, providing that visibility is really a big aspect of our differentiation,” Abramson said.