How Turtle is using AI and Cloud to compete—and win—in a consolidating distribution market

In the fast-moving, margin-tight world of distribution, mid-sized players often face an uphill battle. Competing with national giants means finding ways to deliver more value—with fewer resources. Turtle, the largest women-owned distributor in the US, is proving it can be done. Known for supplying infrastructure modernisation and digital transformation products, services, and solutions, Turtle isn’t just standing out for what it delivers—but how it delivers.

Their approach? Lean teams. Smarter tools. Faster outcomes. Rather than try to match scale with scale, Turtle chose a smarter route: Scale through innovation. By embracing the mindset of "do more with less,” lean teams empowered with smart tools and automation can often match or outperform larger competitors. In a business climate where every dollar must work harder, Turtle shows what it means to do more with less—and win.

Partnering with Infor™ and migrating to Infor CloudSuite™ Distribution has been a cornerstone of Turtle’s innovation strategy. Built on Amazon Web Services® (AWS®), Infor’s cloud-first platform equips mid-sized businesses like Turtle with the most advanced, enterprise-grade capabilities so intelligence and automation are embedded into everyday workflows at a fast pace.

“A key part of our innovation roadmap is unlocking the performance of our teams and how we go to market with customers,” says Luis Valls, co-CEO of Turtle. “There’s always an ROI in every initiative we take with Infor—but beyond that, there’s the customer experience. And that’s the ROI that matters most.”

That commitment is paying off. In their latest Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey, Turtle ranked as a leader in customer service, demonstrating how the right technology investments can drive both operational excellence and customer loyalty.

Attempts to leverage AI for dynamic, competitive pricing failed in the past

A key component of delivering superior customer service is ensuring consistent, fair, and well-justified pricing. Traditionally, Turtle relied on a static pricing model that calculated target prices per stock keeping unit (SKU) based on item categories within customer segments—augmented by the judgement of individual salespeople. While the seasoned sales team brought valuable insights to pricing decisions, their judgements often varied based on factors like volume, customer loyalty, and personal discretion.

This led to inconsistent pricing for the same customer over time, discrepancies across similar customer and category segments, and misalignment with real-time market conditions—particularly for commodity-driven products such as aluminium, copper, and steel. Because the pricing model didn’t account for the complex tradeoffs sales reps regularly encountered, its guidance often lacked the flexibility and context needed to support effective decision-making.

To address these challenges, Turtle saw the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver a smarter, more dynamic, and standardised approach to pricing—one that could strengthen customer trust while improving margins. However, previous attempts to apply AI, even with an in-house data scientist, had not delivered successful results.

“We had to implement AI for pricing because we compared ourselves with the market. We had market reports that showed us that Turtle was below market as far as our pricing, and we wanted to be fair to the customer at the same time as being fair to the business,” says Brian Fitzgerald, Senior Vice President of Digital Operations at Turtle.

Breakthrough in pricing with business-led AI

After subscribing to Infor’s Data Science team, Turtle initiated an AI-driven pricing project that focused on a business-led, agile methodology to ensure true success and adoption.

“Technology is only valuable if the business owns it. With Infor, we’ve been able to let the business lead and IT support that innovation, not the other way around. What’s more, we were able to go from concept to live deployment in just 12 weeks—a personal record in my 30 years in tech,” says David Magee, Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Technology Officer at Turtle.

In just under 12 weeks, a dynamic pricing widget was embedded into the Order Entry screen, giving salespeople instant pricing guidance that continuously adjusts based on real-time transactions and market fluctuations.

Pricing decisions that once took 3 to 30 minutes now take just seconds, accelerating onboarding new hires, reducing reliance on legacy knowledge, and enhancing both employee satisfaction and customer trust through greater pricing transparency and responsiveness to quotes.

“We have a lot of competitors and we're constantly looking at ways to respond to our customers faster. We want to get back to them quickly and accurately at a fair price. We are now able to do with our AI pricing widget,” says Fitzgerald.



In just four months with partial rollout to a small sales team, AI-driven pricing decisions have led to:

• $700,000 US increase in revenue
• 1.3% net increase in gross margin
• 98% faster item pricing, speeding up quote turnaround

The pricing widget displays a recommended price and range—shown in either dollars or gross margin percentage—for any selected item SKU. The widget also includes competitor pricing for comparison, empowering sales reps to remain competitive while capturing margin opportunities where possible.

“The Data Science approach to the price recommendation factors in historical customer transactions, current commodity costs, and customer and product segmentation based on buying behaviour to maximise profitability. It's such an elegant solution to such a complex problem. That's what I love about this," says Fitzgerald.

Expanding AI modelling to optimise inventory

Like pricing, Turtle’s inventory decisions were also based on static, inconsistent metrics that didn’t consider market dynamics. Reorder points were set—and minimum inventory levels remained unchanged for up to two years.

With AI, dynamic inventory reorder points are generated by considering various factors such as historical patterns and fastest and slowest moving inventory. This ensures the right stock is in the right warehouse when the customer needs it. Turtle anticipates the benefits will include a considerable reduction in dead inventory costs in the next three to six months.


“After seeing success with the pricing widget, we wanted to apply AI to another area of the business, which was inventory. The Infor Data Science team exceeded our expectations—not just with their technical expertise, but with exceptional project management. They were responsive, organised, and consistently on track. Compared to other vendors we've worked with, who often miss deadlines or fail to deliver, Infor delivered exactly what we needed—on time and with impact,” says Fitzgerald.

What’s next: Scaling AI and automation with Infor Velocity Suite

Success with Infor’s Data Science team led to further investment in advanced solutions native to Infor’s suite of industry-specific cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. “With Infor Industry Cloud Platform, we can scale innovation quicker than we can with other technology partnerships where you must bolt on, acquire technology, and integrate across vendors,” says Magee.


Infor Velocity Suite promises the next wave of innovation at Turtle with prebuilt industry solutions to automate and deliver insights, leveraging any combination of generative AI (GenAI), AI, robotic process automation (RPA), intelligent optical character recognition (OCR), process mining, and more. Infor Velocity Suite isn’t just about automating workflows and decision making—it’s rethinking what distribution can look like in the modern era.

“Investing in Infor Velocity Suite takes our use of AI to the next level. Beyond access to data scientists and AI, we now have GenAI, intelligent OCR, RPA, and process mining—natively integrated into our ERP. It’s not just about prebuilt add-ons; it’s about enhancing our core ERP system’s intelligence and operational impact,” says Magee.

By focusing on business-led innovation and staying laser-focused on measurable outcomes, Turtle proves that business process innovation beats business size when done right. For others in the industry, Turtle offers a compelling model: Don't compete on size alone. Compete on speed, insight, and the ability to solve problems in new ways. Learn more about Infor Industry Cloud Platform.