Infor has spent the last year heavily investing in Velocity Suite, their AI-enablement platform for Infor ERP systems. There are now more than a hundred industry-specific AI agents, built right into the CloudSuite you already run.
But our clients keep asking questions about how to actually take advantage. Where would I even start? And how do I get from ‘this is possible’ to genuine ROI?”
On the one hand, AI truly does unlock capabilities that were previously cost prohibitive or downright impossible. But on the other hand, it’s a technology like any other. And going from “this is possible” to “we’re seeing tangible ROI” is a problem that we’ve solved before.
In this article we’ll talk about how to apply the previous lessons from change management to the new capabilities that Velocity Suite opens up, and provide some example use cases to get you thinking about what’s possible.
What Velocity Suite is
First, what is Velocity Suite? Infor organizes it around three moves: diagnose, automate, optimize.
Diagnose is process mining. It reads the transaction data sitting in your ERP (purchase orders, invoices, etc.) and reconstructs how your processes actually run vs. how the documentation says they run.
Process mining is, at its core, a modern approach for looking at your workflows and finding the friction. What is genuinely new is that Infor’s version comes pre-mapped to Infor OS, so it can start reading your history without a long integration project first.
Automate is their Value+ catalog of pre-built automations for specific tasks (invoice processing and matching, purchase order updates, vendor compliance checks, returns handling, period-close reconciliation, and the like.) They already understand your data, and the rules for your specific Infor environment.
Even more important is how they’re trained. Infor builds these automations on data from many customers across your industry, so the models are more robust than if they were only trained on your stuff. Most of them are able to be deployed within 30 days.
Optimize is the agent layer. These are role-based AI agents (more than a hundred of them as of the April 2026 release), built on Infor’s industry process catalogs.
The industry specificity is the key thing here. An agent for procurement in a manufacturing setting already knows the difference between a blanket order and a spot buy, and what a supplier missing a delivery does to a production schedule.
But what does Velocity Suite actually enable? You’re only really limited by your imagination and the data it has access to. A few examples problems teams are using Velocity Suite to solve for include:
- Auto-kill duplicate vendor and customer records. Name-similarity matching automatically cleans the master data.
- Catching rogue spend. Process mining can flag every PO that slips around an approval workflow, so you can see in how much is leaking through maverick buying.
- Preview potential blast radius. Before you push a credit-terms change across a whole customer base, you can see the downstream consequences. It goes live once you approve, with the audit trail attached.
- Supplier delivery scores and intelligent routing. The system scores suppliers on whether they actually ship on time, then sends each new order to the vendor most likely to deliver it (by product, region, season, etc.)
- Ask your ERP questions in plain English. “Why did our on-time delivery slip last quarter?” and get a structured answer pointing at the specific bottleneck, instead of pulling five reports.
Velocity Suite is likely a step in a longer-term plan for making Infor ERP the data store that powers the AI-enabled company. We describe this to clients as a kind of “Headless AI”, an intelligence layer that sits on top of the system.
How to Start
But how do you start taking advantage of it? While it’s early days, the path that likely works best is similar to the path taken with other transformation initiatives.
- Start with the need. Resist the temptation to go for the most impressive capabilities. The highest-value starting point is almost always your most manual, highest-volume processes. For most manufacturers that is something like AP invoice processing or purchase order management. Pick something that is well understood and easy to measure.
- Define the target and find the bottleneck. Not “improve throughput.” Something you can count: move from ten thousand units a day to thirteen thousand. Then identify what’s blocking it.
- Sequence the workflow. Start with automations first if you haven’t, because they pay off early and don’t need historical data. Once you have 3-6 months of live operating history you can start to use Process Mining. The agents themselves come last, once your master data has a clear shape to it and your processes are standardized enough to trust what the agents will recommend.
- Make the mining recurring. As you add lines, acquire entities, or enter new markets, new friction shows up and old bottlenecks get replaced. Process mining won’t be a one time thing. Bake semi-annual reviews into your process.
- Decide who owns the outcome. You want to clearly understand the business result and the governance behind it.
That last step is critical, and highlights something that is consistently underappreciated with work like this. The technology by itself is insufficient.
The Value Void and AI
A few months back we wrote about how technology is rarely the variable in an ERP outcome. Since then, Infor themselves have published research to back that up.
Infor studied 3,600 companies across seven industries. Three out of four leaders said advanced technology creates real business value. But only three in ten transformation projects actually met expectations.
Infor has a name for the space between those two numbers. They call it the value void.
I’m guessing you know what the value void looks like, even if you’ve never heard the term. The system works. But it hasn’t translated into value.
Three things tend to drive that outcome. And none of them have to do with the software itself.
- Adoption stalls when nobody reinforces it.
- The system stops adapting as you grow (or acquire.)
- No single person owns the result.
The value void has been there for years with ERP and broader digital transformation work. And, so far at least, the same is true with AI enablement.
This will likely still be true even when the Headless AI vision is realized.
When you put a layer on top of your ERP that can read and write transactions on its own, you have not removed the human. You’ve moved them to the most important seat in the process – approval.
Think about what changes when your AI layer can write to the system instead of just reading from it. It’s one thing to draft a report. A tool that can actually change a customer’s credit terms or post to a ledger is a different thing altogether.
The human’s job is now largely about making decisions on what the system should do. Who should authorize it. Who should see what it did. How you undo it if it’s wrong. And what the company should do as a result. You become a strategist. It’s a harder job, not a smaller one.
Approval also implies you have an audit trail approval after the fact. You have to treat every agent like a user, with its own login and role. You probably need single sign-on, so access ties back to a real person. And you need an audit trail that records who or what did what, when, and why, so a credit-term change or a ledger post can be traced, reviewed, and reversed if it was wrong. Proper governance will be the thing that gives your team confidence to move fast without opening the organization up to excessive risk.
You Don’t Need to Wait
If you’re wondering where to begin with Velocity Suite, the first step isn’t a license. It’s a diagnostic.
Define the problem and the target. Find where the friction is. Rank the opportunities by impact. From there, we can help with the licensing between you and Infor and bring a delivery team to implement alongside them.
AI is here. It’s not a theoretical anymore. It can exist inside your ERP right now. What stands in the way is what always has: a clear problem with a target, clean data underneath it, and a person who owns the outcome. Velocity Suite makes that work faster and easier. But it doesn’t do it for you.
