AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Bringing the Power of AWS Generative AI to Infor’s Industry-First Approach
By Vignesh Subramanian – VP Product Management, Platform Technology, Infor
By Yogesh Dhimate – Sr. Partner Solutions Architect, AWS
By Brandon Blincoe – Sr. Partner Solutions Architect, AWS
By Vishesh Jha – Sr. Solutions Architect, AWS
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Enterprises today struggle to unlock productivity gains across their organizations while managing increasing operational complexity. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) helps solve this challenge by transforming how businesses operate, automating complex tasks, and augmenting human capabilities. Large language models (LLMs) now surpass average human performance across various cognitive tasks, enabling organizations to process, understand, and generate human-like text at scale.
This blog post shows how Infor uses generative AI services on HAQM Web Services (AWS) to help customers speed up productivity and solve industry-specific challenges.
Infor-AWS AI collaboration
In 2013, Infor decided to build and operate its applications using AWS. This collaboration and investment in each other has grown. With Infor becoming part of the AWS Partner Network (APN), attaining multiple AWS competencies, and building over 15 solutions on AWS.
Since 2017, Infor has built offerings in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) leveraging AWS services. In 2017, Infor launched its first AI offering, Coleman, which comprised a machine learning platform called Infor AI built on HAQM SageMaker. This platform provided predictive and prescriptive AI solutions for deep industry problems. Such as inventory intelligence, price forecasting, product up-sell/cross-sell, supply chain intelligence, and vendor rating. Infor complemented Coleman platform with a conversational chat bot leveraging HAQM Lex.
Infor’s Generative AI Strategy and Platform
Building on this experience with traditional AI and ML, Infor is now looking to bring generative AI capabilities to its customers. Infor selected HAQM Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of industry-leading foundation models (FMs) and a broad set of capabilities to build generative AI applications. This collaboration allows Infor to deepen its AWS collaboration, build industry-specific AI capabilities accessible to all customers, and rapidly expand its generative AI solution offerings to drive value for its user base.
Generative AI has captured the fascination of the mainstream, with its chat-like experience making the technology relatable to a wide audience. However, the business value of this technology lies in solving industry-specific problems with the help of domain knowledge. Infor’s deep industry knowledge and AWS’s technology prowess come together to provide value to mutual Infor and AWS customers.
To this end, we analyzed how Infor products were being used, examined external trends, and identified three core spheres within an enterprise that translate to a mix of top-line, bottom-line, and intangible impacts. These spheres focus on enhancing customer experiences, boosting employee productivity and creativity, and optimizing business processes. Each sphere represents a critical area where generative AI can deliver meaningful value to organizations while addressing specific industry challenges and opportunities.
To build a scalable and secure mechanism to deliver these capabilities, Infor has created an internal platform, called the Infor GenAI Platform. The Infor GenAI Platform provides a standardized interface for generative AI capabilities. This allows product teams to build new customer experiences in their CloudSuites efficiently. Teams can leverage existing infrastructure, authentication, and generative AI integrations instead of building from scratch.
They built Infor GenAI Platform interface using Infor OS Platform which provides core services like Security, API Gateway and a standardized way of interacting with AWS.
How Infor GenAI Platform is built
CloudSuites feature development for Infor engineering teams leverages generative AI through Embedded Experiences, a GenAI Assistant, and a GenAI Knowledge Hub.
Infor Embedded Experiences
Infor Embedded Experiences provides generative AI capabilities within Infor CloudSuites, allowing applications to generate and analyze various types of content for their customers. This includes assisted rich text authoring, summarization, comparison, contextualization, and language translations – all available directly within Infor’s industry-specific CloudSuite applications. This capability can also help analyze non-textual content like images and documents. The Infor Embedded Experiences are integrated across Infor’s CloudSuite applications, enabling each CloudSuite to provide features like – generating detailed product descriptions, automating the creation of job descriptions, simplifying document processing and analysis, comparing and summarizing vendor contracts and much more.
Figure 1 shows how each CloudSuite connects to Infor Embedded Experiences’ interface and gets the ability to use industry leading foundation models offered on HAQM Bedrock. To ensure these generative AI features are tailored to the specific needs of each CloudSuite, Infor’s product teams have implemented customized prompt templates within their CloudSuite applications.
Figure 1 – Connectivity between CloudSuites and Embedded Experiences
Infor GenAI Assistant
Infor GenAI Assistant provides conversational user experience for enterprise data and orchestration of various tasks. For example, a business user may need to check inventory levels or approve an order, which may require navigating multiple applications within the CloudSuite. The Infor GenAI Assistant dynamically resolves user intent across multiple systems and data sources. It then curates and contextualizes this information. Finally, it presents the data in a personalized format for each user. This assistant allows users to have multi-turn conversations while retaining context. On behalf of the user, the assistant will manage multiple CloudSuite actions to intelligently fulfill their objective.
The scale of CloudSuites required a scalable architectural solution. A decentralized architecture allows CloudSuite engineering teams to register their tools and APIs directly with Infor GenAI Assistant. Figure 2 shows GenAI Assistance architecture and how the Assistant’s orchestrator maps user intent to specific action sequences using these registered services. By leveraging foundation models (FMs) on HAQM Bedrock, the Infor GenAI Assistant accurately executes complex user requests across multiple CloudSuite services.
Figure 2 – Infor GenAI Assistant architecture overview
Infor GenAI Knowledge Hub
The Infor GenAI Knowledge Hub is a self-service documentation hub. It helps businesses unlock knowledge from diverse data sources. These sources include product manuals, user guides, HR policies, legal documents, wiki pages, and support tickets.
It does this by using a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach. The GenAI Knowledge Hub ingests various knowledge sources, splits them into smaller chunks and vectorizes them by using a text-to-embeddings model offered on HAQM Bedrock. These vector representations and their original chunks are then stored into an HAQM OpenSearch Index, which becomes a vector database. Infor GenAI Knowledge Hub has implemented access control on various knowledge sources that are indexed and their vector representations in order to prevent accidental disclosures.
Infor GenAI Knowledge Hub uses incoming search queries to retrieve relevant vectors and plain texts creating context, then uses HAQM Bedrock’s FM to produce an answer. Infor GenAI Knowledge Hub provides a search interface that is used by various CloudSuite applications as per their information discovery use-case as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3 – Infor GenAI Knowledge Hub architecture overview
Data Privacy, Security, Accuracy, and Ethical Use of AI
The adoption of Generative AI is nuanced and requires careful consideration. As an emerging area of technology, it has gained some ignominy for bias and hallucinations. Another big concern for most customers is the privacy of data. To mitigate these concerns Infor leverages their secure, multi-tenant architecture on AWS where data is isolated from one tenant to another. Infor leverages AWS services such as AWS Identity and Access Management, AWS WAF, AWS Shield, AWS Key Management Service and other services to secure, protect and encrypt customer data. Use of AI within Infor’s applications follow the same security model, with data being secure by design. Customer data is not stored nor used to train AI models. Infor and AWS are committed to ethical and responsible use of AI.
Infor GenAI features are designed with a ‘human-in-the-middle’ approach. A business user must review any generated text or responses from AI before being consumed. Business users gain productivity benefits while also having full control to only apply outputs they deem appropriate.
Conclusion
The integration of generative AI into enterprise software marks a transformative moment for businesses across industries. Through Infor’s collaboration with AWS, Infor is addressing the fundamental challenges that have historically limited AI adoption: security, scalability, and practical business value. The Infor GenAI Platform’s Embedded Experiences, GenAI Assistant, and Knowledge Hub seamlessly integrate AI into business processes while ensuring human oversight.
As organizations navigate their digital transformation journeys, the combination of AWS’s technical innovation and Infor’s industry expertise provides a trusted path forward. Early adopters are already seeing how these capabilities can enhance customer experiences, boost employee productivity, and optimize core business processes. To begin your generative AI journey, explore Infor GenAI capabilities in your AWS region or visit Infor GenAI to learn how our industry-specific solutions can transform your business operations.
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Infor – AWS Partner Spotlight
Infor is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner and AWS Competency Partner Infor supports innovation – and progress – for leading organizations in every industry with specifically-designed Infor CloudSuites. Infor CloudSuites are built for the cloud and backed by decades of practical application and continuously enhanced with the latest innovations, from mobile access and social technologies to industry-driven analytics. Visit infor.com/cloud.