Why the Cloud Promise Fell Short (and How AI Solves It)
In 2012, when I started working with ERP systems, the Cloud was the big promise. From bulky servers to flexible online platforms. A strong standard 'core' with freedom to configure the system to your needs.
To me, that felt like the future. Software we could finally shape according to our own vision.
Reality proved different.
The bottleneck shifted, but didn't disappear
Infrastructure became flexible, but the way we captured processes remained rigid. To get a process into software, we had to translate complex reality into hard logical rules. And that's where it broke down.
The reality of a logistics floor doesn't fit into "If A, then B" logic. There are always exceptions, nuances, deviations. We were trying to force a dynamic world into a static system.
The moment everything changed
Two years ago, our team struggled with a classic problem: matching a delivery address on an order to the right inventory location. The variables were endless. If we'd programmed this traditionally, we would have needed hundreds of lines of code for every exception.
As an experiment, we presented the situation to an AI model. No rules, just context. "Here's the messy data, this is what we want to achieve."
The result: the AI consistently made the right decision.
Why this is fundamentally different
The bottleneck of three decades of ERP was translating context into rules. That translation always lost nuance.
AI doesn't need translation. AI understands context directly.
With that insight, we built MintIQ: the first AI-Native Supply Chain platform. You no longer need to flatten complex processes into simple code. You describe the situation, the nuance, the exception in natural language, and the system understands what needs to happen.
Skeptical? Fair.
"AI in a business-critical system?" I come from the ERP world; I know reliability is sacred. That's why we spent two years building the guardrails that make this Enterprise Ready.
Don't take my word for it. Come see it. Challenge us with your toughest edge case.
The impact
Software that doesn't do "approximately" what you want, but understands exactly how your business works. No rigid rules that limit you, but a system that moves with the complexity of the real world.
The promise of 2012 – software that fully adapts to your business – couldn't be solved with code.
With AI, it finally can.
— Hylke Sluis
CEO and Co-founder, MintIQ