The enterprise software market is converging on a new standard: AI solutions built and delivered through a forward deployed engineering (FDE) approach. Infor helped shape that standard, and we are all in on it. Now, we’re already steps ahead and planning its evolution, using AI to build, refine, deploy, and manage AI. This evolution is significantly improving the pace at which our customers can define and adopt what we build, one that most of the market is not equipped to match.
Where the market is heading
FDE is only the beginning.
Across enterprise software, the shift toward forward deployed engineering is real and accelerating. I understand why. FDE brings a welcome discipline to how AI gets delivered as it provides a structured, collaborative way to continuously scope, build, review, and validate a solution quickly before it reaches production. Set against the “AI experimentation” that characterized much of 2025 and the early part of 2026, this is a genuine step toward helping organizations move from pilots to real business value.
Infor actively invests in this approach and has for many years. The rigor that FDE demands aligns with how we have always approached enterprise-grade solutions delivery: with accountability for outcomes, not just outputs.
However, adopting a market standard and being artificially constrained by it are very different. At Infor, we recognize both the tremendous benefits of the FDE approach and its limitations. That is why our focus is about on evolving it. The FDE approach is just the beginning of a lifecycle focused on building and shaping how AI is deployed. Becoming an agentic enterprise is so much more than deploying AI. It’s about how your organization grows with it, continually iterating, refining and benefitting from the value it creates.
| Where the market is | Where Infor is |
| Adopting FDE | Evolving FDE |
| Vendors are building forward deployed engineering capabilities to bring structure and repeatability to AI solution delivery. This is the emerging standard for enterprise AI deployment. | Infor meets the full scope of what FDE demands, including equipping its engineers with an AI-native platform to prototype, refine, deploy, and manage the full AI solution lifecycle. Same model, multiplied impact. |
The Infor difference
Introducing Infor’s AI Adoption Hub, where AI helps build AI
Let’s be clear about what the AI Adoption Hub is. It’s an architecture, not a delivery method. The AI Adoption Hub evolves the FDE model by using AI to construct and manage an AI solution across the full lifecycle of the solution. From first prototype through refinement, implementation, and the ongoing management that follows, our AI-powered workflows ideate, deliver, and refine your agents.
Infor’s AI Adoption Hub stays true to the same rigor and accountability that forward deployed engineering demands and delivers it at a speed and scale that human effort on its own cannot reach. What’s more, as the AI Adoption Hub ingests more customer data, it continues to accelerate the pace of outcomes and ROI improvement, helping not just to evolve the forward-deployed engineer approach, but evolve your business into a forward deployed enterprise. Currently, our AI Adoption Hub is equipping Infor’s forward deployed engineers. In the coming months, customers will have direct access to not only the tool, but to the opportunity of innovating for their business in real time. That is the power of a forward deployed enterprise.
You may be asking, “what happens to the forward-deployed engineers?” At Infor, they remain essential to the framework and are shifting their focus to spending more time as AI advisors and not merely solution deployers, helping scale AI solutions and guide next-generation AI innovations for our customers. For our customers, it means using their organization’s own data to unlock their strategic path forward and allowing them to be less reliant on volumes of engineers and data scientists to support their business. Through the AI Adoption Hub, customers can play a more active role in directing their own AI journey, with clearer line of sight to the outcomes they expect.
| 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 |
| Prototype | Refine | Deploy | Evolve |
| AI creates solution blueprints from industry-specific requirements, shaving scoping time from weeks to a matter of days. | AI iteratively refines those blueprints against real workflow data, validating the solution before any production code is committed. | Automated pipelines move the validated solution into production with governance fully intact. | Once the solution is live, FDE stops being a delivery engine and becomes a living roadmap, where continuous updates, customizations, and new capabilities are all managed through the AI Adoption Hub. |
Accelerating the pace of outcomes: The table above summarizes the deployment framework. Most of our AI solutions are already going live in about four weeks. With the AI Adoption Hub, I fully expect that benchmark to improve even more.
The proof point
Sub four-week deployment is already happening, and it’s likely to become the standard
Throughout 2026, we have put most of our AI solutions into production in under four weeks. That pace is already ahead of industry standards and we attribute it to the combination of two things: the AI Adoption Hub and the Infor Industry Cloud Platform. Our platform is built for specific industries and wired deeply into the data models and workflows our customers run. This is Infor’s unique advantage. While many vendors are still measuring time to value in quarters, our customers are measuring it in sprints. The AI Adoption Hub is designed to shorten that timeline even further and is already showing great promise in doing so. Yet we all know, realistically, deployment is not the finish line. Once a solution is live, the priority shifts into a mode of continuous delivery, managing updates, absorbing customizations, and building out and expanding our customers’ AI roadmaps without repeating the heavy scoping cycles that a new deployment demands. At Infor, AI adoption isn’t about a series of projects, it’s about the relationship we build with our customers, ensuring they are on an AI-supported cycle that continually supports their growing business and evolving needs.
Team Air Distributing shows what that pace looks like in practice. We built and deployed three agents for them in under two weeks. This pace is not a one-off success. We delivered a complete agent spanning both the AI and the application layer for an industrial manufacturing customer in two weeks, proposed and delivered an agent for a distribution customer the day after it was demoed live in the customer's UAT call, and for another customer, we went from spotting a manual, time-consuming task during a routine update to sharing a working proof-of-concept in one week to a full production deployment in three.
What FDE should mean for you
The real question is not whether your vendor supports AI solutions. It is how quickly and deeply they drive value.
As FDE becomes the expected standard across enterprise software, buyers will need to look past the methodology and ask a sharper question. What is the architecture underneath it, and how does it keep improving your AI outcomes? A vendor that has adopted FDE as a checkbox is not the same as a vendor that has built an AI-native platform that makes its engineers measurably more effective and innately improves outcomes with every deployment.
That distinction matters for one practical reason. It removes any reason to delay. You do not have to choose between deploying now or waiting for added value from tomorrow’s capabilities. With Infor, you get market-leading value today from engineers who deliver it in weeks, on a platform engineered to let you eventually self-design and deploy AI solutions. Waiting will not put you ahead. It only delays the extraordinary value you could be benefitting from today.
The Infor advantage
The AI Adoption Hub is built on Infor's industry-specific data models and workflow architecture, the same foundation that makes our platform fast to deploy in the first place. Competitors adopting FDE are acquiring a process. Infor's position is the product of years of industry-specific platform investment that a methodology change alone cannot replicate, delivered by engineers the Hub makes more capable over time.
The AI Adoption Hub in action: See how our customers are deploying AI in weeks rather than quarters, and what a continuous, AI-driven roadmap could mean for the next phase of transformation in your industry.