Earlier this week, Infor released the latest versions of its CloudSuite ERP solutions. It also hosted the Infor Velocity Summit in Las Vegas. It will host another for EMEA in Amsterdam later this month. Before the event, Enterprise Times caught up with Soma Somasundaram, Infor’s President and CTO, to discuss the update and Infor’s approach to AI.
Somasundaram sees two types of use cases around AI that Infor is building. The first is industry-specific use cases, such as inventory optimization in healthcare and other sectors or bid optimization in aerospace and defence. Infor is working with customers to build these industry-focused use cases. It will then include them in a catalogue of use cases that other customers can leverage.
The second type involves developing specific AI solutions for customers. In this case, the firm leverages the AI-managed service it has built to work with customers in a managed services engagement. This results in a specific AI solution that can help the firm differentiate from its competitors.
The managed service offering can also be used to tweak the available use cases, adjusting parameters and factors to suit each client. It enables customers to personalise Infor AI solutions without their own data scientists.
What differentiates the Infor approach to AI
Chief Technology Officer, President of Products, Infor
Infor has a unique approach to building AI. Its common technology platform, Infor OS, can securely access data and APIs in a single location. What is more important is that it has built RPA, Business Process Intelligence, and AI (including GenAI) within the same platform.
Somasundaram explained this combination, “We can bring a capability that transcends beyond one of the capabilities and brings the benefit of a holistic view of how we can deliver use cases.
“Whether it’s AI and RPA together, or AI calling different algorithms and orchestrating it, the ability to do that in a single platform and bring it together is our focus.”
With regards to multi-modal AI, Somasundaram notes, “We are still in the nascent stages of deploying solutions to customers.” However, the firm already has AI baked into Infor Document Management (IDM), which can capture and interpret PDFs and other documents. It extracts, captures and classifies important content from uploaded documents.
In addition to Infor OS, which is included in all ERP deals, Infor does not charge separately for the AI use cases it embeds within its CloudSuite. AI is not an add-on but an intrinsic part of its solutions. Where customers want something different, the managed services function can provide that.
However, there may be exceptions, with Somasundaram confirming, “As we enhance the library of use cases, those use cases will be offered through a managed service. So that will be an additive capability, but the basic capability of AI comes with a Cloud Suite.”
Somasundaram confirmed how he sees Infor’s differentiation, adding, “One of our biggest benefits is that we have workflow and automation through RPA, AI, ML, Gen AI, and the process mining capability all on the same platform. The benefit of having these things combined is a huge differentiation, which we think will be able to deliver a lot more value against having bolt-on technologies that the customer needs to pull together to get benefits.”
On Agentic AI
According to Somasundaram, Infor is still in the early stages of developing AI Agents. Its approach is to build tools that enable itself and customers to build industry-specific Agents, such as ones that deliver a conversational experience. Will it allow agents to interact with other agents, as well as humans?
Somasundaram explained the approach, saying, “The reason why we built this common platform underneath is to be able to orchestrate Agents to other agents as the need comes up, based on the use cases that architecturally are supported. I don’t have a use case at the moment that uses that experience today.”
AWS and beyond
Infor recently announced a partnership with AWS. Some vendors, such as Salesforce are enabling customers to select which AI vendor’s models they wish to use. While Infor uses Bedrock, Somasundaram explained that choice lies within the orchestration layer of Infor OS for customers.
Customers can choose to connect to a different model, such as Open AI, Anthropic or something else that they feel works better with their use case. Somasundaram points out, “You don’t have to do any wiring, you can go in and select the model you want to deploy, and the Infor OS layer will orchestrate accordingly.”
This flexible approach allows those customers with AI expertise to customise their environment without huge technical knowledge.
If customers use the default Bedrock AI models, Infor leverages the filtering and guardrails that AWS provides users. It is one of the reasons that Infor selected AWS, the strength of this security and data layer. What happens if a customer goes outside the bounds of what Infor offers? In that case, Somasundaram believes that it is their responsibility to ensure that the right filters are there for the ethical use of data.
Somasundaram justifies this by explaining the Infor approach to AI, “We want to offer enterprise-level capability, not a consumer experience because our typical customer is an enterprise customer.”
This is a sensible approach. Infor is delivering a mature, frictionless enterprise-level experience that customers can take advantage of. They also provide the flexibility for customers to go outside those boundaries, which will carry additional risks that customers must consider. Pricing for these future use cases has not yet been determined. However, like Salesforce, token-based subscription pricing is being considered.
What should customers consider?
The majority of Infor customers do not have a data science team or ML capability internally. For this reason, Infor is building the most needed use cases by vertical and micro-vertical and delivering them through managed services.
With Infor providing the expertise, customers do not have to compete for expensive AI talent on the market. Instead, they benefit from proven AI solutions that can deliver value. In discussions with the Infor managed services team, they can also personalise these algorithms with their expertise.
I asked Somasundaram what differentiates Infor AI from other ERP competitors. He believes that Infor addresses what customers actually want. That is not AI, but the solutions that make an actual difference to their business.
Somasundaram added, “We want to be able to build this library of capabilities and use cases. We want to work with hundreds of food and beverage customers and deliver out-of-the-box capability that they can turn on. That is our differentiation. The stronger and more robust the use cases that we have in our library, the more we will differentiate ourselves from our competition.”
He sees other providers having a platform that enables them to deliver their use cases. Infor also does this, but its approach goes well beyond this, delivering AI solutions businesses want to use.
Democratizing AI
Somasundaram believes the Infor approach helps to democratise AI. How is Infor helping to democratize AI?
Somasundaram answered, “If every customer needed to have data science, AI/ML, and technical capabilities to work with AWS, the barrier is too high for many organizations. They are just not set up to take advantage of that.
“For us, we have a vast amount of customer data in our cloud suite. That data is industry-specific by definition because it is the industry Cloud Suite that they’re using. If we build use cases that they can deploy with minimal work it would allow a vast number of customers to be able to use these capabilities without themselves having to build it. In our mind, that is how we would democratize AI.”
There are challenges, though. Infor has to consider which use cases the customers want to deploy and, more importantly, which are likely to offer the best business benefit. The challenge for Infor is to build enough use cases that can make a material difference to a customer’s business outcome. Infor is currently working with a large number of customers to achieve that.
Like Infor, businesses face competitive pressures. They must differentiate their products, services, or costs. They must deploy AI, data-driven innovation, and automation to increase competitiveness. As Somasundaram concluded, “This is not a luxury. This is a need, and organizations must adopt it to survive in their market.”
