Distribution is a high-pressure business. Margins are tight, customer expectations are immediate, and every new branch adds operational complexity. For Team Air Distributing, that complexity scaled quickly. In less than three years, the company expanded from five to 18 branches across the Southeast—multiplying inventory, invoices, and onboarding demands while maintaining the same customer-first standard that has defined the business since 1990.
To meet this challenge, Team Air needed more than incremental automation. It needed a new operating model for artificial intelligence (AI)—one that is not experimental, but guided, industry-specific, governed, and compounding value over time.
Infor™ gave Team Air a practical path forward. “Infor keeps innovating and bringing us these new tools that we can put into place in our business to make a real difference and an impact,” said Alisha Thompson, Chief Technology Officer at Team Air. “I really feel like there is a great partnership that is constantly growing and evolving.”
Team Air’s relationship with Infor spans more than five years, from on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in 2020, to Infor CloudSuite™ Distribution in 2022, and now to AI-driven execution with Infor Velocity Suite. Infor Velocity Suite embeds AI and automation into existing Infor CloudSuite Distribution workflows in a governed environment. Built on Amazon Web Services® (AWS®), it combines prebuilt industry-specific capabilities, including AI agents, generative AI (GenAI), AI/machine learning (ML), process mining, and robotic process automation (RPA), with Infor Forward Deployed Engineers focused on measurable business outcomes.
A clear Infor Velocity Suite return on investment (ROI) anchor for Team Air emerged early: invoice processing automation projected to deliver six-figure annual capacity savings with a sub-two-year payback period. The combination of fast ROI and a structured path to expansion defines Team Air’s journey toward the agentic enterprise with Infor.
A guided path to value
One of the biggest challenges in enterprise AI is starting too broadly, without a clear path to measurable outcomes. Infor Velocity Suite takes a more focused approach. For Team Air, that meant prioritising invoice processing while also deploying AI agents to reduce day-to-day operational friction. This dual-track approach delivered both immediate productivity gains and a roadmap for broader automation.
“Our team saw immediate value once Infor Velocity Suite was turned on, particularly in its ability to answer complex ERP questions overnight,” said Thompson. “Users quickly began viewing it as a first line of defence.”
One industry cloud platform, multiple compounding use cases
Unlike generic AI tools, Infor Velocity Suite is built on industry-specific Infor CloudSuite solutions. For Team Air, that means AI operates within real distribution workflows, data structures, and process models, making outputs more trusted and immediately usable.
1. Credit Agent: Faster decisions, more customer time
Team Air’s accounts receivable (AR) team was spending significant time answering repetitive credit enquiries, each requiring 15–20 minutes of manual investigation across ERP screens and internal knowledge sources. With AI agents embedded in Infor CloudSuite Distribution, employees can now ask questions in natural language and receive answers in under a minute. The agent is grounded in Team Air’s customer data and credit policies, enabling fast, trusted responses without manual navigation.
As Thompson explained, “What makes the Credit Agent so powerful is that it already understands our business. It knows our customers, our credit policies, and our history inside Infor CloudSuite Distribution. Our AR team gets trusted answers in seconds.”
Results:
- 80%–90% faster resolution time
- Over 2,000 hours saved annually
- Increased AR capacity for customer-facing work
The impact is not just efficiency—it is a shift in how AR teams spend their time, moving from system navigation to relationship management.
2. Inventory Agent: Smarter sourcing across 18 branches
Team Air is also using an Inventory Agent to speed sourcing decisions across its 18-branch network. Instead of manually checking branch availability, employees can identify the best inventory source in under 60 seconds using Team Air’s own business rules. The result is faster fulfillment decisions, reduced search time, and fewer unnecessary transfers or expedited purchases.
As Thompson noted, “The inventory agent doesn’t just search; it thinks like a distributor.”
Results:
- 80%–90% reduction in sourcing search time
- Faster inter-branch fulfilment decisions
- Reduced unnecessary expedited purchases and transfers
Beyond time savings, the agent improves cost efficiency by optimising inventory movement across the network.
3. Invoice processing automation: Clear ROI at scale
Team Air’s accounts payable process has historically required significant manual effort, with time-consuming invoice handling that limits capacity for higher-value work. Using process mining to map the end-to-end workflow, Team Air identified invoice processing as a primary automation opportunity. The resulting roadmap includes GenAI-powered invoice processing with staged automation targets.
Expected outcomes:
- 60%–70% invoice automation in Phase 1
- Up to 95% automation in Phase 2
- Sub-two-year payback period
This frees finance teams to focus on more strategic work while creating a clear, scalable ROI case for automation.
4. Private knowledge hub: Scaling institutional knowledge
Team Air is also building a private knowledge hub to support onboarding and operational consistency as the business grows. The hub centralises standard operating procedures (SOPs) and institutional knowledge so agents can provide more context-aware guidance to employees. Over time, this is expected to improve onboarding speed, standardise execution across branches, and make agents smarter through richer context.
"Through all of the information in the private knowledge hub, we're making agents smarter through contextual awareness. It’s like a super smart teammate that we get to talk to at any point in time, that we have by our side, and we can ask any question," Thompson said.
Governed velocity: Built-in trust at scale
Trust is essential to deploying AI at scale. Infor Velocity Suite embeds governance, risk, and compliance directly into the platform so agent actions are auditable, traceable, and governed by role-based security. For Team Air, that means faster answers and automation without compromising enterprise controls.
Becoming an agentic enterprise
Team Air’s journey is not ending at go-live. Working alongside Infor Forward Deployed Engineers, the company continues to test, refine, and expand AI use cases in production.
“I would say the best word to describe Infor Forward Deployed Engineers comes from a Buddhist phrase, which is “the beginner's mind”. They are so excited about the potential of helping us move forward with our business that pretty much any idea, any crazy idea, they are excited to help us with. We have been shown immediate value. The turnaround time is so fast,” says Thompson.
This model ensures each new use case builds on prior intelligence to accelerate time to value. Team Air is still early in its AI transformation, but the direction is clear: it is the emergence of an agentic enterprise, where AI is not a tool but a continuously improving system of how work gets done.
"I think we're just scratching the surface of what we're doing right now compared to what our direction is. We've seen time savings. We have seen increased capacity for our coworkers. We have also seen dollar savings as well," concludes Thompson.
Mona Patel
Industry & Solution Strategy Director, Infor