Distributors run on thin margins and fast turns. Every order touches pricing, inventory, purchasing, warehouse, and finance, often across many branches. When the answers sit in separate screens and spreadsheets, people spend their day hunting instead of acting.
The October releases of Infor CloudSuites™ for distribution address these challenges. The common thread is artificial intelligence (AI) and automation built into the work distributors already do: agents that flag what needs attention, workspaces that put each role's priorities on one screen, forecasts that work when sales history is thin, and warehouse tools that respond to plain-language requests.
Here's what's new:
AI agents and insights that surface what needs attention
Your teams often spend too much time navigating multiple screens to address routine operational questions, which can lead to important exceptions being missed until a customer calls or a margin report lands. A variety of new AI agents for inventory, product, quoting, finance, procurement, supply chain and pricing monitor demand, supply, and transactions, and coordinate work across quoting, purchasing, order entry, and accounting—resulting in fewer manual touches, less “firefighting,” and ability to scale across numerous business processes.
New AI-generated recommendations and insights pages bring shortages, delays, and cost overruns into everyday workflows early, and generative AI (GenAI) in global search shows prioritised insights at the start of each day. These new AI capabilities not only enable faster action to ensure on-time delivery and protect margins, but also result in higher productivity (especially for new workers) and the ability to handle higher transaction volumes without added headcount.
Prebuilt automations that take on the manual work
New automation solutions across key finance, sales, procurement, and maintenance include:
- Counter sales price intelligence
- Sales and accounts receivable anomaly detection
- Supplier statement reconciliation
- Predictive maintenance insights
- Cross-sell recommendations
- AI-assisted buying
There are also updates to invoice processing, bank statement scanning, and customer account creation. These solutions reduce operational costs and enable teams to adopt automation faster, with no custom solutions to build.
Role-based workspaces and applications that put priorities on one screen
Finishing one task shouldn't take a dozen screens. New role-based workspaces give finance, service, rental, project, warehouse, and inventory employees a tailored starting point with embedded key performance indicators (KPIs) and suggested actions specific to their role. The Advanced Inventory Manager Workspace, for example, shows turns, surplus, fill rate, and safety stock in one view, resulting in higher inventory turns and less excess stock so working capital is freed.
19 new and updated Experience Designer apps across key functional areas such as finance, service, maintenance, sales, and projects combine multiple screens into one, reducing the risk of errors and allowing teams to spend less time clicking and more time deciding.
A GenAI Assistant that turns questions into answers
The Infor™ GenAI Assistant is now the default landing page of the Infor Operating Service (OS) portal, positioning AI as the primary entry point for every user session with a dedicated area for reports and charts, turning conversations into actionable business insights.
The GenAI Assistant Knowledge Hub improves worker productivity by instantly answering plain-language questions from your own documents and Infor product documentation, and new guardrails keep responses reliable and protect sensitive information.
Open integrations that connect AI across your ecosystem
Support for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol now connects Infor GenAI Assistant to other chatbots and third-party AI assistants such as Microsoft® Copilot and ServiceNow, so agents can communicate securely across different ecosystems while reducing coordination and integration challenges.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) support provides a single governed interface that replaces per-agent integration work, allowing for greater efficiency and lowering the risk of error and non-compliance.
More than 100 new and updated application programming interfaces (APIs) give information technology (IT) teams more freedom to connect AI, analytics, and automation tools, reducing integration effort and paving a path to faster innovation.
Demand planning built for the long tail
Slow-moving and newly added stock keeping units (SKUs) rarely have enough sales history for traditional forecasts. New AI-driven attribute-based forecasting predicts their demand from product attributes instead.
Strategic inventory planning is now available to set safety stock from forecast variability across branches and distribution centres, and event-based forecasting models the demand effect for promotions, rebates, and seasonal events, while allowing forecasts to be consumed at a lower, branch-level planning level.
The result? You get less dead stock and meet fill-rate commitments without tying up extra working capital with inflated stock.
Smarter warehouse execution from dock to counter
Picker travel and high workforce turnover drive up warehouse costs. Two new agentic AI capabilities for Infor WMS address both.
- The Batch Wave Agent groups orders that share line items into high-quality pick waves on request, cutting travel between locations and lowering the cost per order.
- The User and Task Management Agent handles onboarding, permissions, and task reassignment through plain-language conversation, greatly reducing repetitive work and speeding up new employee training time.
Rapid receiving for large orders and image capture in Infor Factory track, digitised packing lists and bills of lading upon receipt, and Proof of Delivery for will call orders reduce errors and disputes from receiving to pick-up.
Faster, more accurate quoting
Product Advisor identifies parts from a photo and suggests compatible alternatives, so representatives can help customers who arrive without a part number.
AI-assisted quoting turns a plain-language description of customer needs into a validated configuration.
AI document processing converts requests for quote (RFQs), purchase orders (POs), and PDF files into configure, price, quote (CPQ) quotes or enterprise resource planning (ERP)-ready orders.
These new capabilities help accelerate quote creation and shorten sales cycles, with fewer mis-ships and less reliance on a few product experts.
Finance tools that accelerate close and protect margin
Tiered vendor rebates replace spreadsheet tracking with multi-level structures that match your vendor agreements.
Improved financial reporting tags ledger transactions by customer, product, warehouse, or order to expose profitability blind spots.
Automated bank statement reconciliation allows AI to identify the transaction types from a scanned bank statement and reformat the data for the reconciliation process, leaving only unmatched items to resolve, so finance closes the month faster with fewer manual errors.
Sustainability reporting for European Union trade
For distributors trading in the European Union (EU), a new content library in Infor Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Applications maps sustainability data to the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), which can shrink audit prep from weeks to days.
A new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) module classifies imported goods, captures emissions data, and calculates required certificates.
Learn more
From AI agents that flag exceptions and ready-made automation for finance and sales to advanced demand forecasting, faster quoting, and warehouse tools that respond to plain-language requests, the October 2026 release puts AI to work across your distribution operations.
Visit the Infor Community for a closer look at each new feature and the steps to activate them.
- View Infor CloudSuite Distribution Enterprise release summary
- View Infor CloudSuite Distribution release summary
For more information on how Infor CloudSuites for distribution help distributors navigate today’s dynamic market with the right tools and industry-specific AI, visit infor.com/distribution.