Everyone has a friend they keep meaning to see. "Let's plan dinner," you say, and you mean it. Then you say it again six months later, when you happen to run into them. The intention is always real. The dinner rarely happens. A plan that never turns into action is just a nice idea.
That is why the phrase “enterprise resource planning” has never quite sat right with me. Words matter. Plenty of vendors are talking about what they plan to do with AI agents. Far fewer are doing it. In the blog, The Agentic Enterprise, Rick Rider, Infor's Senior Vice President of AI Innovation, lays out our vision for the agentic enterprise and what we are actually building to make it real for customers. It is more than enterprise resource planning (ERP) and more than a set of artificial intelligence (AI) use cases. It is a vision that, until now, didn't have a name.
When Gartner® introduced enterprise resource execution (ERX), the next generation of intelligent and autonomous ERP, we clearly saw ourselves in this newly named category. The name for the category is new. The work is not.
From system of record to system of execution: The move from ERP to ERX
For more than a generation, the job of enterprise software was to remember. Record the transaction, close the books, store the order, report what happened. That level of functionality has been enough for a long time.
But is it still enough? Expectations are changing. Fast. Expectations that require your core system to not just remember, but act on what is happening. A system of record can tell you the line went down last week. A system of execution sees the shortage coming, secures a supplier that still meets the date, and keeps the line running. The value shifts from merely explaining the past to shaping what comes next: problems pre-empted, plans that adapt in real time, and processes that get more efficient on their own.
Make no mistake. The system of record is not going away. If anything, it matters more, because every action an agent now makes inherently takes its direction from the system of record. Getting 80% of the right answers to prompts is often fine. Getting 80% of the right actions posted to your ledger or released to your floor is not.
This difference is where the paths split. Exactly what directions are your system of record giving? For some vendors, ERX means bolting an agentic layer onto a generic core, with agents and governance perched on top. It looks fantastic in a fancy demo, but your generic core system has already limited how precise the agents can be, how safely they can act, and how cleanly they integrate with the rest of your stack.
At Infor™, we believe the true embodiment of ERX starts a layer deeper, with a core system of record that is composable, natively integrated, and running on a data fabric built for AI, with semantic meaning, industry processes, and a knowledge graph built in. After all, the agentic layer is only as good as the core beneath it.
The ERX maturity stages, from ad hoc to autonomous
As Rick outlines in his blog post, becoming an agentic enterprise is not about a technology upgrade. It’s about strategically transforming how your organization uses its data and automates its decisions.
Gartner defines this transition in five stages: Ad hoc ERP, foundational ERP, scalable ERP, intelligent ERX and autonomous ERX.
- Many organizations remain at the ad hoc or foundational stages of ERP maturity. The gap between scalable ERP and intelligent ERX is where competitive differentiation begins to emerge—and where CIOs face the highest risk of falling permanently behind.
- CIOs and heads of enterprise applications who have deferred cloud migration, clean core discipline, and/or data integration face a compounding liability. Vendor platforms are embedding agentic AI capabilities now, and organizations on legacy, heavily customized ERP are increasingly architecturally excluded—not just functionally behind.
- ERX consists of six characteristics—adaptive experience, embedded insights, fluid knowledge, autonomous orchestration, connected data, and composable architecture—that will evolve at different rates. The fully realized vision of autonomous ERX remains several years out.
- Vendors are currently selling an ERX vision while delivering foundational or scalable ERP. Not all vendors will successfully navigate this transition, and not all organizations will need or choose to pursue an ERX state.
- The organizations that recognize this shift early—and deliberately build toward it—will operate with a speed and precision that legacy-bound competitors cannot match.
So why make the move and invest in ERX today, rather than waiting three years? Because the category is being defined right now and the field is wide open. Almost no one has it yet, so the largest leaps will be made by those who move now, not those who scramble to catch up later.
The window is open. Today, the stage you’re at on your journey is an internal detail. Soon, it becomes a competitive fact, an increasingly widening chasm between those who are winning and those who are falling behind.
As Gartner puts it: “Your ERP is about to become either your biggest competitive asset or your most expensive liability—and most CIOs won’t know which until it’s too late.”
Mapping the agentic enterprise to ERX
Now that the category has a name, what will change at Infor? Nothing. ERX is not a pivot for us, not a roadmap item, not a rebrand. To us, it validates what we have already built and the journey our customers are already on.
At Infor, we’ve identified four key requirements for becoming an agentic enterprise, all achievable when the core system is built around the specific requirements and processes of their industry.
Base language models like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT are remarkable, and in their base form, industry-agnostic. A general model can reason about your industry. But it cannot run it, because it does not know your processes, your data, or your rules. That inherent industry knowledge, context, and expertise is the Infor difference and what turns a capable model into an agent that can act.
Key requirements of the agentic enterprise
Precise industry agents act like seasoned team members on day one, These team members understand processes inherently and what good looks like for your industry.
- Turtle, a global electrical distributor, realized a 1.3% margin gain and a 98% improvement in quote turnaround through AI automation.
- Coram, a manufacturer in the Netherlands, cut warehouse travel distance by 25% and reduced its reliance on temporary labor.
- State Electric Supply cut diagnostic time in half and surfaced process issues 86% faster after migration.
You can’t deliver these outcomes with clever prompting. They are the result of industry-specific data modeling built into the agent, which knows that a purchasing agent in a hospital prioritizes Food and Drug Administration (FDA) compliance, while one in food and beverage weighs perishability and seasonal demand. That is the data model, not prompt engineering.
Adaptive experiences allow teams to focus on the work that matters while agents handle the routine. Instead of another rigid screen, people work through conversational windows embedded where work already happens, delegate tasks in natural language, dial the level of autonomy up or down, and receive outcomes rather than workflows.
What makes that experience cohesive is the open architecture beneath it. Because the platform is connected across the systems people already run—Infor and non-Infor alike—they work in one place instead of stitching together a screen per system. That connectivity is included in the platform rather than sold as a separate middleware layer. This is a critical differentiator which is why many vendors are now spending heavily to assemble this experience after the fact.
Autonomous orchestration runs multi-step processes end-to-end across systems, including non-Infor systems, with no manual handoffs and no new tech debt. The Infor Agentic Orchestrator acts as the central authority layer, coordinating specialized agents over open Model Context Protocol (MCP) and surfacing exceptions when a person needs to weigh in.
However, an agent is only as good as what it can reach and direct. When you orchestrate across a best-of-breed stack held together with custom integrations, you get a weak ERX no matter how capable the agents appeared in a demo. Our agents work natively across your Infor CloudSuite™ that is integrated by design rather than cobbled together. Your agents also connect seamlessly to third-party systems through the Infor Industry Cloud Platform.
With Infor, your agents reach across your entire tech stack. Our open platform lets them see and act across every system, not just Infor's own. Our agents can run in third-party orchestration, and third-party agents can run on ours, so you are never locked in. Compare that to a closed system, where an agent hits a wall the moment a process crosses into another system, and stops halfway. How is that helpful?
Zahid Group is putting agents to work on order-to-cash and procure-to-pay across a multi-company group and anticipates up to 90% time saved across those functions. Gellert Global compressed integration timelines from years to three months.
Governed velocity is the pillar that makes the other three safe to use, because trust is what decides whether autonomy truly comes to fruition. You wouldn’t sign a contract you couldn’t read, so why would you allow agents whose actions you can’t audit? We build trust into the core rather than bolting it on.
Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) are written into the core code, so every action—whether human or agent—is auditable, traceable, and compliant by default. People set the limits on what an agent may decide on its own and oversight runs at machine speed. You can see how every decision was reached, your customer data is never used to train our models, and there are no opaque black boxes.
We call this trustworthy AI, and for the agentic enterprise it is not a nice-to-have. It is the price of entry for allowing AI to act, and the line between an agent you demo and one you trust to run the business.
Underneath all four pillars sits the Infor Industry Cloud Platform: connected data and composable architecture through the data fabric, and the fluid movement of knowledge through Knowledge Graphs. The pillars are not bolted onto a generic core. They sit on an industry platform built for exactly this.
Gartner is explicit that the category will not land the same way everywhere: “Depending on an organization’s business model, there will be two distinct ERX—one where autonomy scales through process determinism, the other where it scales through contextual intelligence—and any vendor assuming a single ERX blueprint will underserve half the market.”
We do not bet on one blueprint, because we built a distinct data model for each micro-vertical rather than one generic template, which is what equips us for both paths instead of one. We recently published a white paper outlining our strategy on becoming an agentic enterprise.
Infor elevates you a step above the rest
Our industry-specific approach was built for this moment. We think that, when you consider Gartner’s assessment of the stages of ERX alongside Infor’s requirements for becoming an agentic enterprise, we can confidently offer our customers the ability to operate at the intelligent ERX stage, with people in the loop and autonomous capabilities continuing to advance. We know it’s a bold claim. A bold claim underpinned by the value our customers see unfold in their organizations every day. How did our customers get there? Through one single offer. Infor Velocity Suite combines AI, Industry AI Agents, process mining, automation, and prebuilt industry use cases in one package, paired with Forward Deployed Engineers (FDE) who co-innovate with your team to turn capabilities into outcomes. The pricing is predictable, and the agents and orchestration come included, not as add-ons. Because industry expertise is already built into the agents and the data model, every deployment starts from a known baseline rather than a blank slate, which allows us to deliver these outcomes at materially lower risk. That is a competitive differentiating combination other vendors can’t replicate. Why train generic agents to learn your industry on your time and your budget, when you can deploy Infor agents with 25 years of industry specificity natively architected into the product?
AI-powered by industry context: Structural or cosmetic?
The demise of an industry makes great headlines. The notion of “do or die” to compel buyers to abandon logic and jump is exactly the tone being set by many newcomers to the AI space. Headlines like “ERP is dead,” because organizations can point agents at a data lake or buy a general-purpose AI platform and skip the industry system entirely.
It is a compelling story, and parts of it are true. AI is dissolving some of the advantages traditional vendors leaned on for years, and new entrants will carve out real space at the edges. But there is a ceiling. As Gartner puts it, "AI will remove many traditional barriers that ERP vendors have enjoyed but may not achieve the higher levels of autonomy noted."
As an enterprise vendor, ignoring this reality would be the fastest way to lose credibility. Gartner says that, “By 2030, AI-native start-ups targeting ERP functions will capture 20% of the small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) market but will not capture any meaningful share of enterprise size customers.”
We get it. A sales pitch that begins with, “Skip the long implementation, and point agents at this portion of data instead of standing up a full system” does sound appealing, particularly for a small or medium-sized business with limited resources. The reality, however, is shallow process depth and simple use cases. Neither drives compelling value.
Future-proofing your business should never be a concession. For many, the “small business” label is temporary. Processes deepen, volumes grow, and compliance and reporting demands multiply, and the lightweight system that once supported them is now holding them back.
With Infor, there are no concessions. The same platform and industry data model that serve the enterprise are equally appropriate for an SMB organization today, ensuring today’s decision scales as your business grows. That is the difference between picking the right system once and replacing it the day your business outgrows the first one.
Real process execution runs on context that is baked into Infor CloudSuite. An agent is only as good as the context beneath it, and there is a massive difference between context an agent can retrieve and context an agent can be trusted to execute on. A generic model can read your data and produce a confident recommendation. Whether you would let it post the entry, release the purchase order (PO), or hold the shipment is another question. A flawed dashboard can be ignored. A flawed autonomous decision can bring a production line to a grinding halt.
Execution-quality context is not retrieved at inference time. It is structured into the system itself, governed and auditable: the workflows, the compliance rules, the key performance indicators (KPIs), and the vocabulary of a specific industry, so an action can be allowed and not merely suggested. That is the data model, not prompt engineering, and it is the one thing a generic platform cannot acquire by ingesting more of your data.
AI agents need to have the full power of your systems behind them when they are acting at enterprise scale or making decisions that move money or halt operations. Opting for the appealing sales pitch may have created agents quickly, but it likely left them void of deep decision-making insight and context when it comes time for business-critical decision making.
With Infor, it’s not only about the scalability of your system that supports the speed and precision of your operations. Our FDEs work side-by-side with your team to co-innovate, dynamically build an AI roadmap that addresses your highest-value problems and deliver outcomes in weeks. This begins your journey of compounded value as every use case that goes live makes the next one faster to stand up. Why choose between speed and depth of industry expertise? Infor offers you both.
The road to autonomous execution runs through industry context. Meaningful, deep context cannot be bought, downloaded, bolted on, or prompted into existence. It is the foundation for becoming an agentic enterprise, and the catalyst for how quickly you can journey through the stages to ERX. Infor offers your organization and your agents the structural advantage and delivers the outcomes you desire─with speed, precision, and no concessions.
*Gartner, Introducing ERX, the Intelligent and Autonomous Next Generation of ERP, By Greg Leiter, Allan Wilkins, Johan Jartelius, Neha Ralhan, 7 May 2026
GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.