Six months behind on day one
Shared by Derek from PeopleSoft Insider · November 2, 2026
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In April, Rondy Ng told a room of analysts that the AI agents were not coming to EBS, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, or Hyperion.
He said two things six months apart. Put them side by side and the entire urgency argument for leaving your current ERP or PeopleSoft system falls over. This is the clearest admission yet of something a lot of us suspected, and it changes what you should be working on this quarter and next year.
He is Oracle’s EVP of applications development. He said it in one sentence:
“To enable this, you have to get to SaaS.”
I wrote about that line. Plenty of people did. It reads as a wall, and for anyone running a system Oracle has stopped adding intelligence to, that is exactly what it is.
This past Monday, at Oracle AI World, the same executive said something else.
Most existing SaaS customers, he said, are still deploying AI agents Oracle wrote six to nine months ago. Most customers are at least six months behind.
Read those two sentences together.
Get to SaaS to unlock the agents. And the customers who already got to SaaS cannot deploy the agents they already have.
Jon Reed, who was there, put it plainer than Oracle would. Oracle offers fully autonomous agents and a supervised research mode, and the typical customer is not ready for either one.
Ng was candid about why. He expects the first AI applications to land will be the ones that need the least change management. The ones requiring real operating procedures and controls come later, once customers build confidence.
Which is a vendor saying, in public, that the hard part is not the software.
But this isn’t really about Oracle’s roadmap. What I want to highlight is what the second sentence does to the first one.
If migrating to SaaS delivered readiness, those customers would be deploying. They are not. They bought the platform and discovered the platform was never the constraint.
I have started calling it the readiness gap, because it deserves a name and because it explains almost everything confusing about this moment.
The readiness gap is the distance between what your vendor has shipped and what your organization can actually put into production. It is measured in change management, controls, and trained people. It cannot be closed by purchase order, which is why it does not show up on any roadmap slide.
And here is the part that should change what you do on Monday and beyond. The readiness gap is platform-independent.
Everything that is holding those SaaS and Fusion customers back is the same work that would hold you and your team back.
Deciding which process an agent touches.
Naming who owns it.
Writing procedures somebody will follow at 2am.
Understanding how your team secures and works with LLM’s and MCP servers.
Building the confidence to let it run.
None of that is just SaaS or Fusion work. It is your own work, and your team’s work, and you can start it on any ERP or PeopleSoft system you are standing on right now.
I know what many will say and what their objection will be:
“They are all behind because the technology is new. Everybody will catch up eventually.”
Partly true, and if the gap were a product learning curve I would agree completely. Six months of fumbling with a new feature is normal and it closes on its own. But I know many PeopleSoft customers that have been lagging behind and still haven’t caught up, for whatever reason.
But Ng did not describe a learning curve. What he described is what every organization faces no matter what product they have:
Change management
Operating procedures, and controls.
Those don’t compress or disappear with familiarity. The ERP shops that are six months behind on their first agent will be six months behind on their tenth, eleventh, and twelfth, because the thing slowing them down is not the AI agent.
HERE IS THE PART FOR THOSE THAT OWN A BUDGET AND A TEAM
Brian Sommer made a point at that same event that nobody in this ecosystem wants to repeat. The incremental savings from these new AI applications are small compared with the automation gains enterprises already banked years ago. The easy work was automated a long time ago.
Which means the ROI conversation is coming, and it will be harder than the one you had for your last ERP project. Executives are going to ask for clear return and headcount justification on agents that are, by the vendor’s own account, still sitting undeployed six months after purchase. Have an answer before somebody asks you for one in your next steering committee.
Sommer also said the quiet thing about the vendors themselves. Oracle, SAP, NetSuite, and Infor are all running nearly identical AI strategies. His phrase was that they are all singing from the same hymnal. If every vendor’s AI pitch is the same pitch, then “migrate to get AI” stops being a reason to migrate, at all.
FOR THE RECRUITERS READING THIS, I CHECKED THE PEOPLESOFT CAREER JOB BOARD AGAIN BEFORE WRITING THIS
Third week running, not one posting mentions AI, agents, or MCP.
Integration shows up.
Event mapping shows up.
Cloud shows up.
But, the skill every vendor says is the future appears in zero requisitions.
Back to those two sentences, six months apart.
The first one told a lot of people they were on the wrong side of a wall. I’m calling FOMO.
The second one quietly admitted that the people on the right side of it are standing still like a dear in the headlights.
So here is the question I will leave with everyone at the C-Level and in leadership:
if readiness is the real constraint, and readiness is not something you can buy, what is the first piece of it your organization could learn or build this quarter?
THE OTHER PATH NOBODY IS SELLING YOU
Worth knowing that outside analysts are describing a future that looks nothing like the migration deck you see from a vendor.
Larry Dignan at Constellation Research argues that enterprises will not rip out their ERP (including PeopleSoft) just to get AI agents.
Instead, they will put an AI agent layer over what they already run, augment it, and abstract it for a replacement much further out. His line about replacement is the best sentence written about ERP this year: it said:
“It’s like performing brain surgery on a rocket ship.”
He expects agentic AI to become the primary interface to applications and data, which is a very different claim from agentic AI becoming the application.
FOR MY PEOPLESOFT TEAMS AND FOLLOWERS HERE’S WHAT YOU SHOULD FOCUS ON
Sit all of this SaaS and AI agent mambo jamb next to the latest PeopleTools 8.63, now available on-premises [ https://substack.com/redirect/c62ae0c7-8fd1-4ae4-85de-5fdbc56b42b9?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ] as of October 20. MCP server support [ https://substack.com/redirect/cc91a8fa-657b-4e41-b5ef-382daca16ced?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ]. A search service an agent can call as the user. An abstraction layer over a system of record, delivered by the vendor, for the platform that supposedly is not getting any intelligence.
The analysts are describing the architecture. Oracle shipped you only a piece of it. Nobody put those two facts in the same sentence, which is roughly where we came in.
ROLE OF THE WEEK
PeopleSoft Systems Administrator (ERP Administrator II)
University of Wisconsin-Madison | Full-time, fixed term | 100% remote eligible | $110,000 to $120,000
This is the strongest posting on the board right now, and the preferred qualifications read like this newsletter’s last six weeks.
PSAdmin on Campus Solutions, Financials, or HCM
DPKs, PUM, and Open Search
Scripting for startup, shutdown, monitoring, and notifications
Integrating SAML authentication with the PeopleSoft stack
That last line is worth pausing on. Native SAML 2.0 landed in 8.63, and this university is already hiring for the skill.
Terms to know before you apply. It starts as a one-year appointment extendable to two, and can become permanent depending on funding and need. Fully remote is allowed under an annually renewed agreement, and you supply your own internet while they supply the computer. No sponsorship, and because UW-Madison is not an E-Verify employer, F-1 STEM OPT does not qualify.
They are explicit that reviewers advance candidates on the written materials, so the letter of qualifications is not a formality. Address every preferred qualification by name.
Apply here: https://www.peoplesoftcareer.com/jobs/784201203-peoplesoft-systems-admin [ https://substack.com/redirect/7bb476b3-382a-4d59-ac81-10c9a68395df?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ]
Hiring PeopleSoft talent? Your role can run here. Reply to this email.
THE PEOPLESOFT JOB MARKET THIS WEEK
Higher education is not just carrying the board this week, it is paying. Two fully remote university roles posted with real bands, which is a combination that barely existed two years ago.
PeopleSoft Systems Admin - University of Wisconsin-Madison, Remote (Madison WI), Full-time, $110k to $120k (2 days ago)
Lead Programmer Analyst - North Dakota University System, Remote (USA), Full-time, $95k to $107.5k (2 weeks ago)
Campus Solutions, Applications Programmer V - University of Central Florida, Orlando FL, Full-time, $89k to $115k (3 days ago)
PeopleSoft Functional GL/KK Lead - Metaformers, Contract (6 days ago)
Lead PeopleSoft DBA - The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson TX, Full-time (3 weeks ago)
Senior PeopleSoft Integration Developer - York University, Toronto ON, Full-time (1 month ago)
Lead Program Financial Analyst - L3Harris Technologies, Rochester NY, Full-time (1 day ago)
Cloud Solutions Architect - Trigyn, Beirut Lebanon, Contract (1 day ago)
Move fast on the UCF role if it interests you. Its posting end date was October 29, so it may already be closed.
Two things worth noticing. A Workday reporting role surfaced on a PeopleSoft search this week, which is what a market mid-transition looks like. And for the third week running, zero postings mention AI, agents, or MCP.
View all open PeopleSoft roles: PeopleSoftCareer.com/jobs [ https://substack.com/redirect/77babab0-20d3-4388-88c0-2980111b1a3c?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ]
Thanks for being a subscriber. I’ll see you next week.
Derek Tomei
Founder, PeopleSoftCareer | Editor, The PeopleSoft Insider
You can buy a platform. You cannot buy AI readiness. One of those two was always the hard part.
P.S. Readiness is a people problem, which means it is learnable, which means it is the one part of this you control. The playbooks, the prompts, and the people working through it alongside you are all in one place. community.peoplesoftcareer.com [ https://substack.com/redirect/cfdc32e3-8aa4-43df-8b30-dd5d07b13103?j=eyJ1IjoiMTR3eXB3In0.f-xldB9G03IXstk7BAMCqX62DEM2cFHI5JhVsvW8cAA ]