Enterprise Times has followed Aera Technology for years. It recently announced a new target industry, Education, for its decision intelligence platform. Enterprise Times spoke to Fred Laluyaux, CEO of Aera Technology, about the company’s activities and plans for the coming years.
Laluyaux describes Aera as a “Software company, purposely built to enable decision intelligence, which is the digitization, automation and augmentation of decision making.”
Aera started building its platform seven and a half years ago with a single goal. It wanted to deliver the deployment of decision intelligence at scale across all industries. Laluyaux said, “What differentiates us is that after seven years of investment and partnering with some of the largest companies in the world, we have the first and only pure-play decision intelligence platform that allows companies to rapidly deploy and scale the decision intelligence program.”
The firm has served large enterprises across sectors such as CPG, Retail, Pharma, Life Sciences, Oil and Gas, and Discrete Manufacturing. Its foray into Education was well thought out and an indication of the maturity and cross-industry nature of its platform.
The firm is still private with key investors such as Silver Lake Waterman and DFJ Growth. It has achieved high to double-digit growth in 2024 with a global footprint with employees in North America, Europe, Australia and Singapore.
2024 to date
Aera has been busy this year. On the product side, it is completing the original vision for its platform. After GenAI was released in 2023, this year it releases the next evolution of its Aera Decision Cloud platform. It includes:
- Aera Agentic AI
- Aera Workspaces for a unified experience to ask complex questions and get answers from the decision data model and use Calc Modeling
- Control Room capabilities that provide visibility and control across the entire decision intelligence network
The platform now enables situational decisions, effectively helping organisations to make ad hoc and more unstructured decisions in context. These new capabilities have enabled Aera to add several new logos this year, including The Kraft Heinz Company, J.D. Irving, Baxter Healthcare, and InfraBuild.
Current customers that have expanded their existing roadmaps include firms such as Unilever, Mars and Dell Technologies. These customers are leveraging the AI-powered decision intelligence capabilities to transform and improve their supply chain metrics.
In addition, Western Governors University is helping Aera enter the education vertical with groundbreaking work that reduces the student dropout rate.
In 2025 and beyond
Aera is riding a wave of growth into 2025, and the company is seeing that growth accelerating. Partly, this is due to its platform being mature and ready to deploy. The other reason is how Gartner positions the maturity of decision intelligence. Laluyaux confirmed, “It’s showing up as transformational with a maturity between two and five years. And talking with them yesterday, it seems we’re much closer to the two than the five.”
What has changed in recent months is that companies, beyond the early adopters of goods manufacturers, are now seeing the benefits of decision intelligence, including the education and public sector. In fact, WGU started because Joe Dery, Vice President – Dean of Data Analytics, Computer Science, & Software Engineering, had used Decision Intelligence at Dell and believed that the technology could make a significant difference to the University.
Looking further forward, I asked Laluyaux what his vision for Area Technology is. He answered, “To be the leader in the decision intelligence market. It’s going to profoundly change the way work happens in large enterprises and have a profound impact on the way large organizations are deploying resources to deliver their goods and services.”
Why invest with Aera
Laluyaux does not see companies turning to ERP solutions for decision intelligence. He has seen enterprises that have invested millions of dollars into cloud infrastructure for data trying to build it. The result is that 50% of Aera leads come from such organisations. He has identified two issues with the DIY approach.
First, they cannot scale it out. Pilots might work in North America, but they don’t work globally. They have to be recreated. Secondly, the decision platform needs to evolve. Decision Intelligence solutions must be capable of learning as the business and environment evolve. Aera has both flexibility and scalability to enable the challenge of scaling by volume and scaling by use case.
Laluyaux explained, “We have to marry two things that usually don’t marry very well. The flexibility and the complexity of analytics with the strength and the reliability of transaction processing. That’s what makes a decision intelligence platform unique. You can build something on your own, but you’re going to be stuck because you’re not going to have the flexibility or the ability to learn from the decisions that you made.”
Learning is one of Aera’s core pillars. Aera understands, recommends, acts, and learns. It learns from each of its autonomous actions, feeding the results of every decision it has made to improve future decisions. Critically, the platform also retains the human-in-the-loop. It enables the business user to confirm whether the automation should be tweaked based on evidence from prior actions.
It is impressive that Aera has built a platform capable of doing this across industries. It is doubly impressive that it has just proven this with its launch into education, a very different industry from where it started.
The Rise of Decision Intelligence
Gartner predicted that by 2026, 75% of global enterprises would apply decision intelligence practices for logging decisions for subsequent analysis. Laluyaux concurs in data, analytics and industry-specific conferences, such as supply chain or procurement, that he has seen 30-40% of presentations include the word decision. He sees that organisations now have the data but have not managed to build scalable engines that can deliver insights from that data.
How does Area help them? “We built the most advanced technology platform that enables companies to initiate a decision intelligence program at a fair cost.”
The Aera platform enables customers to deploy decision intelligence to a single site or region within two to three months and then scale it out. This is not a company that came up with an idea and found a market fit after seven years of trying. Aera had a clear vision and has worked toward the holistic decision intelligence platform for seven years. Its customers are now reaping the rewards of those investors.
When I spoke with Laluyaux pre-COVID, one of the organisation’s challenges was that the early adopters saw the technology as such a big differentiator that they were not all happy about promoting it to the wider industry. The success is now out of the bag, hence the rapid growth and adoption. Laluyaux feels that decision intelligence has reached the tipping point.
Laluyaux is seeing new roles specific to decision intelligence, and Aera is helping to define them. He gave the example of the decision architect and the decision analyst. The firm is launching a community, building models and processes for the industry. One of the challenges when creating a new category is that the leader has to do some education in that industry.
The tipping point
Why does Laluyaux think we have reached that tipping point? He explained that in the first few years of Aera, customers were looking to Aera to set up their first decision intelligence solutions. Today, as he mentioned earlier, 50% are moving to Aera after the failure of their DIY trials. He believes that will continue to be the case as most companies struggle to build a scalable and flexible platform.
The second reason for arrival at the tipping point is that decision intelligence is the only way organisations can fully leverage their data to create insights. He cited one example.
“There is a project that has been talked about publicly. It’s called Sky. It’s a demand forecast, and we’re running that with our client, Unilever. It’s demand forecasting at the store SKU level, based on sell out data, and the frequency is very high. You cannot run this in the traditional tools. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t scale.”
Challenges facing those implementing decision intelligence
Implementing decision intelligence is not easy; there are still challenges to overcome. Laluyaux identifies that the biggest issue is change management because it changes how work is done.
The second is data. Organisations must have access to internal and external data, which must be reliable and the right data. Data quality is important, and Aera has a solution Laluyaux calls ‘self-healing, master data’. It allows the system to self-correct when there is an anomaly or incorrect data point.
I asked what use cases are best considered for implementing decision intelligence.
Laluyaux answered, “My recommendation to all our clients when they’re starting on their journey is to take the types of decisions that are high frequency with medium complexity. The users adopting this need to feel ‘Oh my god, this is really helping me’, like an order management skill.”
He also shared that Dell began their decision intelligence journey with a sales order reporting skill, high volume, medium complexity, and users felt the benefit right away, because it took work away from them.
For its education solution, Aera uses student performance data to identify whether the student is at risk of dropping out. It then identifies seven actions a mentor could take and recommends one of them. The counsellor will ultimately decide which to take, the decision is captured, and the subsequent results of that engagement will be used to help with learning. This makes Aera iteratively improve the decisions it offers.
On the future
Where do you see decision, intelligence as a technology going in the next two to five years?
Today, Laluyaux sees a three-layered system existing globally: a system of transactions, a system of differentiation, and a system of intelligence.
“I predict that in five years, maybe 10 years, that you’ll have two systems. You’ll have a system of record that’ll get more and more intelligent. It will start capturing some of what those traditional planning tools do. You’ll have a system of intelligence that will have sucked in the traditional BI (Business Intelligence) solutions, and it will be more intelligent in orchestrating decisions across the value chain.
“The system of intelligence will be a decision intelligence platform. In 5 to 10 years, you’ll have two core systems: a system of orchestration of the transaction and a system of orchestration for the decisions. That will wipe out a ton of the point solutions that are in the middle doing one thing in a silo.”
Agentic AI
I asked Laluyaux what Aera is doing around Agentic AI. It has already built it into the platform and will demonstrate this at its November conference, Aera HUB 24. The first leverages Agentic AI to create skills and test their adoption. This will enable the Aera platform to build new skills and iterate them autonomously and quickly.
The second, Laluyaux stated, “Is the ability to work on unstructured data. We have built a skill around claims management that reads through a bunch of PDFs, identifying a problem in that claim, and then you can trigger a decision-making process. Today, that process is done manually.
“It improves the time to value, and it allows us to work with unstructured decisions, meaning that your decision logic is not static, and it will require an evolution based on the evolution of the context.”
Those agents will also drive decisions into third-party solutions such as SAP or Salesforce. This will enable manufacturers with digital twins to understand the variations that data changes create, identify decisions that need to be made, and act on them.
The Book Question
What was the latest book you read?
“I just finished Team of Rivals, which I have wanted to read forever, by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Amazon Aus, UK, US), which is the story of Lincoln’s life, but with a strong focus on how he was able to bring the five key rivals that he had while winning the election into his cabinet and work so well together. That was a really inspiring, a really good book, not a new one, it’s around 15 years old, but a really good one.”
Any takeout for business from that book?
“I don’t know if it’s business or if it’s in general, but his magnanimity, his ability to rise above the emotions and make the right decision for the cause that he was fighting for, was just remarkable, instead of taking shots and being angry. It was after the Civil War. It was like, let’s extend a hand and not blame people. That was remarkable, and especially in this day’s economy and politics, we need more Lincolns.”
