Buyers are changing how they buy
By the time a customer talks to your sales rep, they’ve already done their homework. They’ve read your website, and increasingly, they’re asking AI tools to compare their options. Behind most quotes are handoffs: an email to engineering, a spreadsheet passed back and forth, a request waiting in a queue. Each one is a place where the answer can drift from what the buyer already read.The quote carries more weight than it looks. For manufacturers selling configured products, it’s the first step of execution: one specification drives pricing, engineering, purchasing, manufacturing, and accounts receivable. When the spec is wrong, the promise breaks later, in purchasing, on the manufacturing floor, or in an invoice dispute months down the line.
AI is showing up on both sides of the quote. On the selling side, Gartner predicts that by 2028, AI agents will outnumber human sellers 10 to 1. On the buying side, picture an agent sending the same RFQ to several suppliers at once and comparing what comes back. The fastest credible answer moves forward. The others never find out why.
These changes were the starting point for the Infor CPQ (Configure Price Quote) track at the recent Infor Velocity Week event. John Schuck, VP and General Manager of Infor CPQ, said: “The quote is your single source of truth to your customer. It’s where your customer experiences your company: your products, your pricing, your responsiveness, and whether you keep your promises.”
Informed buyers who expect no friction, a quote that connects to every part of the business, and buyers that may be machines: three shifts with one thread running through them. Customers still want to talk to your people. What they won’t accept is the friction around the quote.
And your buyers, your people, and your AI all run on the same product knowledge. If it’s scattered across spreadsheets and a few experts’ heads, everything built on it is slow, and an AI agent can’t use it. If it’s governed and connected, everything built on it is fast.
Why AI belongs inside CPQ
AI makes well-defined product knowledge more important, not less. An AI tool that guesses at your products puts your promises at risk. One that works from your governed product rules can speed up the work while the business stays in control. That’s the idea behind embedded AI in Infor CPQ: it works inside the rules behind your configurations and quotes.What’s new in the Infor CPQ 2026.10 Release
The October release puts embedded AI to work in three places where friction builds up. For leaders, this comes down to three outcomes: faster responses to buyers, fewer costly errors, and growth that makes better use of your specialists’ time.AI-Assisted Product Modeling
Product models for configurable products are usually built and maintained by hand, which slows down how fast new products or options can be sold. AI-Assisted Product Modeling uses embedded AI to accelerate ruleset creation and maintenance, helping teams bring configurable products to market faster while reducing manual modeling effort and making better use of specialist expertise.Benefits:
- Bring new products and options to market sooner and begin generating revenue earlier
- Free product specialists to focus on new products and complex requirements, while routine rule updates move faster
- Apply the same governed product rules across every sales channel, so only what can be built is quoted
AI-Assisted Quoting for Configured Products
Selling a configurable product usually depends on the one or two reps who know it inside out, and even then, quote creation involves multiple manual steps and option sets that are easy to get wrong. AI-Assisted Quoting gives reps a conversational way to configure products: they describe the customer’s needs, receive guided prompts to fill in missing details, and generate a validated configuration that can be added directly to a quote.
Benefits:
- Respond to buyers ahead of competitors on the opportunities already in your pipeline
- Protect margin by catching configuration errors before they lead to rework, change orders, and invoice disputes
- Extend quoting capability across reps, dealers, and distributors for better consistency, with specialists available for the complex cases
AI Document Driven Transactions Agent
RFQs, purchase orders, and customer requests often arrive as PDFs or free text, requiring manual data entry that slows response time and introduces errors. AI Document Driven Transaction uses AI to convert these unstructured documents directly into structured CPQ quotes or ERP-ready orders.
Benefits:
- Shorten the time from RFQ to quote, so you remain competitive when buyers approach several suppliers at once
- Redirect skilled staff from data entry to customer-facing work
- Reduce errors at the start of the order, where they are most costly to correct
Ready to see what’s possible?
For manufacturers, this release is about fast, accurate configuration and quoting, whether the request comes from a person or an AI agent. That means less time lost to configuration logic, quote errors and manual data entry, and more time spent closing. These capabilities are available now, and existing Infor CPQ customers can reach out to their account manager to discuss further. If you’re evaluating CPQ, this release shows how much of the quote cycle AI can take on.
Discover more about Infor CPQ.