Infor shipped three AI agents into a distributor's ERP in two weeks.
Infor is putting its own engineers inside customer operations, a practice the industry calls forward-deployed engineering, ERP Today reported.
Most of Infor's 2026 AI deployments reached production in four weeks. Named customer Team Air Distributing had three agents live in under two weeks. Infor attributes that pace to embedding its engineers in the customer's workflow.
Rick Rider, Infor's SVP of AI Innovation, told ERP Today why deployments cannot simply be copied between customers on the same software footprint: "Because even if we've got the exact same industrial manufacturing customer on the exact same footprint, it's always going to be uniquely different based on how they handle their business process."
ERP Today also cited Microsoft's $2.5 billion investment in Frontier Company. AWS is committing $1 billion to a global forward-deployed engineering organisation.
Production speed is only the first number. For an ERP agent, the number that counts is what happened to the process afterwards, whether cycle time fell, errors dropped or each transaction cost less.
What did your first AI agent change after it went live?
Sources
Our file on Infor
All 2 Infor storiesFor your next steering committee
- 1Ask which AI tools already touch your ERP or finance data, including the ones nobody approved.
- 2Ask what each tool is allowed to change, and who reviews what it changed.
- 3Ask how the result is measured, and who decides to switch a tool off.
Issue 01 of the ERP LEADERS brief puts a timeline, the three-number review and six questions on one page. Read issue 01
Welcome back. · Issue 01