Inforum, Infor’s flagship event for customers, partners, and special guests, is being reimagined as a digital experience rather than the traditional in-person conference for this year. It’s scheduled for Sept 15-16 with a mix of on-demand and live sessions that includes customer stories, networking opportunities, product roadmaps, and industry insights.

The theme of “Unprecedented Challenges. Real Opportunities” encapsulates the premise that will be showcased through the event: Despite the extraordinary circumstances individuals and businesses are facing today, the future holds opportunities. Technology will be a catalyst for recovery and reimagining. Attending Inforum will help your enterprise prepare for the next normal. Supply chain planning, facility maintenance, team collaboration, direct distribution to customers, contactless hospitality, digital retail, niche manufacturing, and patient-centered healthcare are among the hot topics coming up.

Learn more about this digital event.

Infor is focused on productivity improvements and outcomes-based delivery of projects as the keys to ERP technology success.

To enhance productivity, Infor wants to make it easier for customers to move to its CloudSuite systems, a cloud-based ERP, and wants those systems to be embedded with intelligent ERP technologies such as business analytics, as well as AI, machine learning and robotic process automation (RPA).

"We're constantly looking at ways for our software to bring value to your organization," Infor CEO Kevin Samuelson said during Inforum 2019's opening keynote.

There is interest in intelligent ERP, but some customers and analysts believe it's too early to tell if it will be widely adopted in applications.

Distribution business trends for 2019, the year of moving strategically.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a lot of people talking. The fact that those people no longer hail primarily from the world of science fiction is representative of just how far the ideas driving this technology have come. AI has entered the mainstream, and it has the technology world buzzing with excitement. The potential applications of AI are vast and varied. And in truth, that is where the real excitement lies—in finding out just how far we can take AI, and in turn, how far it can take us.

Kelly Squizzero, Infor’s Director, Industry & Solution Strategy, points to five key business trends that are shaping distribution business in 2019.

Could AI solve that problem? Speed that process? Five important things you should ask to unearth AI opportunities in your organization.This article by Kevin Casey at the Enterprisers Project which is a community of CIOs discussing the future of business and IT, provides actionable insights on how IT and business leaders can think clearly about where AI might be a good fit. 

According to Gartner, more than 3,000 CIOs ranked Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics as the top differentiating technology for their organizations. If BI and Analytics is such a game-changer, then why is the average adoption rate in organizations only 32%? Despite the efforts of Cloud BI vendors making it easier for users to acquire, explore, and analyze data sources without IT dependency, lack of data literacy and analytic skills still hinder widespread adoption for data-driven decision making.  But the industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation. The mainstream arrival of Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings with it the potential to finally meet the demand for actionable, enterprise-wide, fact-based decision making.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a lot of people talking. The fact that those people no longer hail primarily from the world of science fiction is representative of just how far the ideas driving this technology have come. AI has entered the main stream, and it has the technology world buzzing with excitement. The potential applications of AI are as vast and varied as any complex technology vision that has ever been brought to life. And in truth, that is where the real excitement lies—in finding out just how far we can take AI and in turn, how far it can take us. In this paper, we’ll take a look at the many exciting applications taking shape for AI today; what ideas are on the horizon; and importantly, what the potential impact on the B2B world might be.

Expectations are high, as long as AI delivers real business value

What do IT decision makers really think about AI? Are they buying the hype? Are they laying some groundwork for artificial intelligence implementations?

Random interviews with several IT managers across a variety of industries on The Hub show floor at Inforum 2018 reveal what one might expect — a variety of opinions on AI. But most all believe it could be big, possibly very big.

Another widely held belief is that tapping into the capability of AI to optimize human potential will take some trial and error. To some extent, this reflects the thinking of sports superstar Venus Williams, who told a packed General Session at Inforum, “Failure is a huge part of knowing your pushing yourself hard enough.”

But all agreed on one thing: IT must acknowledge AI in some way, and at least begin to closely and seriously examine how it might fit into their organizations. After all, as Williams said, “It’s not where you start, but where you finish.”