Faxing the PDF sounds absurd. So does asking AI to work with a 30-year-old ERP. We fixed the second one. Catch the Museum of Tech in Barcelona at the Gartner IT Symposium, which starts this Monday (9).
“Get the fax ready. I need the PDF asap.” “Please, forward the invite to my payphone calendar.” “The technician is on the way to repair the pigeon.” Say any of these at work tomorrow and your colleagues will assume you are joking, or that you have just returned from a very long expedition.
Now try this one: ask your AI to check the open purchase orders in the ERP installed 30 years ago. For plenty of IT teams, that request sounds just as unlikely. The ERP has no idea what an AI is, and the AI has never met the ERP.
We fixed the second one
Frends Enterprise MCP puts a Process in front of the old system, with no changes to the system’s code, and exposes specific tasks as governed tools: look up pending invoices, fetch vendor details, approve or hold an invoice.
The AI client you already use, Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot or another of your choice, calls those tools. Guardrails and per-identity access controls apply to every call, and every call is logged as a Process instance.
The 30-year-old ERP stays exactly as it is, and your AI can finally work with it.
A museum, for the sake of argument
We built a small museum to make the point and are flying some props to Barcelona. The Museum of Tech opens at Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo on November 9 at the Frends booth (#551). Four exhibits will be there in person, each with a card that states its case in one line.
The rotary phone. The telegraph. The abacus. The typewriter.
Eight more exhibits run as images all week: a fax, a payphone, a pigeon, a reel of film, a clay tablet, a Rolodex, a stack of punch cards and an overhead projector. Behind each joke sits a task your team may still do the old way.
Tell us which antique item reminds you of your stack
Walk up to any of these relics and tell the team which one used to be in your life and how they remind you of a system you run. We will show you what the modern version looks like. Our team will host demos throughout the week so you can see Frends in action.
Then you can watch the real thing. At 3 p.m. on Nov. 11, Frends CTO Asmo Urpilainen presents “Witness AI build governed access to a real system. Live on stage!”. Skip the sales pitch. There are no pre-recordings. You will watch an AI investigate a real ERP, build the connectivity layer with guardrails and execute actions.
Asmo will show how Enterprise MCP connects an ERP to your AI of choice in a few minutes, with full governance, and share a glimpse of what IT leaders can expect in the coming years.