Infor and Amazon Web Services have announced a new set of industry-specific AI agents aimed at manufacturers and distributors, as the two companies seek to move artificial intelligence deeper into day-to-day operations.

According to the companies, the tools are built natively on AWS and are intended to help enterprises reason through, plan and carry out tasks across complex business processes. The collaboration is framed as a response to a familiar problem in industrial software: many firms have tested AI in pilots, but fewer have scaled it reliably across production environments. AWS said the focus has shifted from experimentation to deployment, with Ozgur Tohumcu, general manager of automotive and manufacturing at AWS, saying, "The conversation has changed from 'where do we start with AI' to 'how fast can we scale it." He added that the companies are helping manufacturers move from pilot to production more quickly.

Infor said the agents are designed around manufacturing-specific workflows such as bills of materials, supply chains and shop-floor operations. Rick Rider, senior vice president for product management at Infor, said, "Generic AI doesn't work in manufacturing , you need agents that understand manufacturing-specific operational processes, bill of materials, supply chains, and shop floor realities."

The companies pointed to early customer results in support of the launch. Xpress Boats, an Arkansas-based boat maker, said it used Infor’s tools to identify bottlenecks in procurement, order management and demand planning within a week. The company said this helped it improve issue diagnosis, reduce the time spent on returns processing and cut expedited shipping costs. Jennifer Terry, information systems manager at Xpress Boats, said the software "has the potential to redefine how we operate."

Infor said the offering is currently in limited availability through its Velocity Suite and that customers can also build custom agents using Infor Agent Factory alongside AWS services including Amazon Bedrock, Bedrock AgentCore and SageMaker. The latest announcement follows a series of earlier Infor-AWS collaborations, including work on generative AI and cloud-based industry applications.

Source: Noah Wire Services