Auckland, 27 May 2026
When MYOB brought Discover Live to the Park Hyatt in Auckland on 27 May, it was never going to be just another product showcase. For anyone running MYOB Acumatica, it was the most consequential one yet. The headline was not a new screen or a faster report. It was a fundamental answer to the question every New Zealand business has been quietly wrestling with: how do we actually use AI on our own data, safely, without handing it to someone offshore?
The day opened with an invitation-only executive breakfast for senior finance and operations leaders, and closed with a programme built around real customers rather than slideware. Avanza Solutions was there throughout, and one of our own construction customers, Kyla Langeveld of Camex Civil, took the main stage as a guest speaker. What emerged across the day was a clear, grounded picture of where MYOB Acumatica is heading, and a reminder that the technology is only ever as good as the foundations beneath it.
The headline: AI on your own data, in our region
The announcement that should reframe every AI conversation you are having is the Anthropic and AWS partnership. MYOB is bringing a managed Claude model into MYOB Acumatica via AWS Bedrock, with all processing happening in Australian data centres. In plain terms: your data stays within the region, and it is not used to train external models or shared with third parties.
That single decision removes the hardest part of adopting AI for most businesses: the "which AI model, on what contract, and where does our data end up" problem. MYOB has made that call, kept the data in-region, and built it into the platform you already run on. For a New Zealand business with compliance obligations and a board that asks pointed questions about data sovereignty, that is the difference between a year of legal review and simply switching a capability on.
The second major reveal builds on it. AI Studio lets you build your own automation agents in plain English, running inside MYOB Acumatica, against your own data and your own user permissions. The pitch was a sharp one: be among the first to build agents now, before your competitors have even worked out what they are for. The businesses that experiment early will have a head start that compounds. They will understand where agents help and where they do not, while everyone else is still reading about it.
It is worth learning the language MYOB uses for all of this, because it makes the value concrete. AI shows up in three modes: Assistant to move faster, Advisor to make better decisions, and Automation to remove the work entirely. The point is not the branding. It is that AI is no longer a bolt-on experiment. It is becoming part of how the system works.
Why the foundation matters more than the feature
If the announcements made the exciting case, the executive breakfast made the important one. It was a candid, off-the-record roundtable, so the value is in the themes rather than any individual quote, but those themes were consistent, and they are the real story.
The recurring point, raised again and again: data integrity beats tooling. The businesses getting genuine value from AI are not the ones with the flashiest tools. They are the ones who consolidated onto a single system first. Point AI at disconnected or duplicated data and all you get is confident rubbish, produced faster.
That leads to a way of thinking about AI and the ERP that we find clarifying, and that came up directly when the table asked whether AI eventually replaces the ERP altogether. The answer was a firm no, but with an important shift in how the two work together:
AI is becoming the system of user interface — not a replacement for the ERP. The ERP stays the system of record; AI is simply how people who don't want to live inside the ERP get at what it knows. A CEO who can never find the P&L can just ask for it.
Wayne Potgieter, National Sales Manager - Avanza Solutions
The third theme was trust and change management. Adoption works in small steps. Let people see a small win before you make the big ask. And, the point that tied the whole morning together, the system of record has to be clean before you point AI at it. AI is less a silver bullet and more a new team member: powerful, genuinely useful, and still capable of getting things wrong if you feed it the wrong information.
That realism is exactly why Avanza recommends the MYOB Acumatica MCP Connector in its read-only configuration by default, with write access available only on an explicit opt-in basis. Confidence in the data comes first.
A customer who has lived it: Kyla Langeveld, Camex Civil
If the breakfast made the case in principle, Kyla Langeveld made it in practice, and because she shared it from the main stage, we can tell it openly. As General Manager of Finance and Shared Services at Camex Civil, a family-owned civil construction business 27 years in the making, Kyla has guided the company through four years on MYOB Acumatica, interviewed on stage by MYOB's Valantis Vias.
Camex came to the platform with a familiar problem: systems that would not talk to one another. Kyla described inheriting a business where a simple question meant staff opening multiple laptops and web pages just to assemble a single answer.
"When you ask simple questions and you watch people pull out lots of different laptops, you watch the web pages open up here, there and everywhere, and they've got two screens trying to give you one answer — that wasn't anyone's fault. It was the systems that we had at the time."
— Kyla Langeveld, GM Finance & Shared Services, Camex Civil
That foundation turned out to be decisive. Camex has since grown from roughly $40 million to around $100 million in annual revenue, and Kyla is clear that good systems were a critical part of being able to do it, particularly as the business took on more local-government clients with heavier compliance demands. The implementation itself was deliberately fast. Camex went live over a single weekend, with one day of downtime on the Monday and every team live on the Tuesday, having migrated thousands of projects across. Kyla was generous about the role her implementation partner played:
"The best part about using a partner is it's like having a friend who's read the instruction manual before you try and build something. They know what works, they know what doesn't work. They've seen companies with like-minded situations achieve similar outcomes."
Four years on, the original goal of removing data duplication by bringing HR, payroll, finance, health and safety and quality assurance onto one platform has done far more than tidy up the back office. Camex Civil is now Camex Group: seven companies, built and acquired, all running on the same MYOB Acumatica instance, with the same finance team closing all seven month-ends together.
"Same personnel, a lot more companies. When we're closing month-ends, we're closing all seven companies all at the same time. That's only possible because the system gives us the means to achieve volume, and we've taken advantage of it."
From a tidy foundation to a real AI advantage
Here is where the two halves of the day meet. Camex is one of the pilot customers for the MYOB Acumatica MCP Connector, the tool Avanza built to connect live ERP data to Claude, and the early experience has surprised even Kyla.
"I think it's where you knew AI would get to, but I can't believe that it's actually here. The biggest advantage we're seeing — my CEO can just ask simple questions. What was our largest customer last month? What was our best-performing project? Because we took the time to give MYOB all of that data from the onset, it now has access to all of that data."
And crucially, she connected it back to a decision made years earlier for an entirely different reason:
"It's funny how what you started out initially in a project — to remove duplication — is now almost the platform that's leveraged us to be AI-ready. That was never the intention from the get-go."
That is the whole argument in one sentence. The unglamorous work of consolidating systems and cleaning up data, work done to solve a duplication problem, turned out to be the runway for AI. Camex is taking it at a measured pace, still on the read-only connector, because the real constraint is not the technology:
"The backbone of this all is trust. We're still in the read-only function, amazed by what it can do. We need people to get comfortable with such a new and amazing technology. Getting them to see the benefit of what is in front of them is our primary goal."
What it means for the future
The pattern across the whole day was consistent. The businesses pulling ahead are not the ones using the most AI; they are the ones using it in the right places and embedding it in the workflows that actually drive the business forward. What unlocks each stage of that journey is trust, both in how leaders personally come to trust the technology and in how they build an organisation that can trust it over time.
For Avanza's customers, that is the real takeaway from Discover Live 2026. The future of MYOB Acumatica is not a single dramatic feature release. It is a managed, in-region AI capability arriving on top of a platform you already trust, and a steady, compounding return for the businesses that have already done the foundational work. AI then arrives not as a disruption to absorb, but as a natural new way to interact with information that was already trustworthy.
That is exactly how we see it, and why we are advising our customers to start now rather than wait for the technology to feel finished:
"The businesses that win with this won't be the ones who bought the cleverest tool. They'll be the ones who got their house in order first and then moved early. Get your data onto one platform, get your people trusting it, and AI stops being something you bolt on and becomes simply how you ask your business questions. That groundwork is the real competitive advantage, and it is work you can start today."
— Penny Boland, Group CEO, Verde Group New Zealand
Kyla's advice to the room captured it better than any roadmap could:
"If you were just using it for finance right now — use it to your advantage, grow, take up a new platform today. Talk to your partners about great ideas, talk to the other businesses here. No doubt everyone's doing something amazing."
— Kyla Langeveld, GM Finance & Shared Services, Camex Civil
Where Avanza fits
Our role has not changed, but the opportunity has grown. We help New Zealand businesses get more from MYOB Acumatica, and now that includes helping you take advantage of managed, in-region AI safely and at the right pace: consolidating disparate systems onto one platform, building construction and manufacturing configurations that shorten implementation, getting your data foundation ready for AI Studio, and guiding the careful, trust-first adoption of the MYOB Acumatica MCP Connector. Our job, as Kyla put it, is to be the partner who has read the instruction manual.
If you would like to talk about where your business sits on that journey, from tidying up the data foundation to building your first agent, we would be glad to start the conversation.
Avanza Solutions (Verde Group New Zealand Ltd) is a dedicated MYOB Acumatica implementation partner. Camex Civil is an Avanza Solutions customer; their details and quotations were shared publicly at Discover Live 2026, held in Auckland on 27 May 2026, and have been lightly edited for readability.
