I have never been to Inforum, Infor’s user conference before. I have watched from a distance as the company has worked to transform itself, and with special interest in how that transformation applies to retail.

In retail, much of it has been a ground-up reinvention, furthered by partnerships with lighthouse clients like DSW Shoe Warehouse or Whole Foods (what happens next there is a story for another time – a time after it becomes clear whether Amazon will actually be able to acquire the company). But it has been enough time since these initial partnerships in retail – and enough time since several retail-related acquisitions have been added to the portfolio – that it’s time to check in on Infor’s progress in retail.

At Inforum, retail was not heavily featured, though I have the impression that it has had its due attention in the past. And there were two big announcements at Inforum that, while horizontal in nature, have big potential impact in retail: Coleman AI, and a platform based on a “network-centric ” view of apps. I confess, for the latter, I don’t fully grasp what it is they’re talking back, but I’ll try to play it back as best I can.

We’ll start with network-centric first. The idea of network-centric solutions builds off of the GT Nexus acquisition, which, on its surface, makes good sense. GT Nexus effectively built a network that lets multiple supply chain parties connect to each other. The idea is that, instead of one party being “king of the heap ” within the network like a network owner, the technology provider is essentially the network owner and everyone else is a participant of equal standing. It takes the idea of multi-tenant and maintains all of the controls over what information is shared with parties on the network, while breaking down all the barriers inherent in a multi-tenant solution.

I guess to continue the building analogy, instead of owning a condo in a building, or even renting an apartment, it’s like living in a commune or a co-op. You can carve out your own private space and determine the rules for how other people in the building can engage with you, so you still get your own locked room, but no one has more of a voice in determining the future of the building than anyone else – except in the sense that you’re all living in a building that is ultimately owned by the tech company vs. a 3PL or a retailer.

That’s fairly easy to wrap your head around, because it’s supply chain related, and these concepts have been in play for awhile now. So now try to wrap your head around the idea that this concept applies equally to Enterprise Asset Management, or Human Capital Management. Instead of customers or locations or orders having some sort of universal standing within the network, much like electricity or water or heat in a building, you have employees or trucks or refrigeration units or other heavy equipment.

I was willing to go along with the idea as it was explained, but then they started giving examples. I won’t be able to recreate them exactly, but as I said, I’ll try to see if I can do it justice. Think of a piece of equipment – in a retail context, let’s stick with a refrigeration unit in a grocery store. The temperature in the case is starting to climb. Not enough that it triggers a failure alarm, but the trend is enough to catch the attention of Coleman, Infor’s AI platform (I’ll get to that below). In a non-network enterprise solution, Coleman would bring it to the attention of a maintenance team within the retailer, who would then maybe contact the store and have a store associate run through a simple diagnostic, but most likely decide to contact the contractor responsible for refrigeration maintenance to go out and check on the device.

In a network-centric model, the company barriers are down, managed by permissions still, but instead of relying on humans to intervene, Coleman would be the driver behind identifying the right resource – whether in-store employee or contractor service provider – and leveraging that resource, including scheduling and keeping track of any contractual obligations that might be invoked, for example if the unit was still under warranty. As long as the right permissions are in place, what Coleman can initiate isn’t limited by the four walls of the enterprise, because that enterprise sits within a network-centric solution. Relationships are managed as a network of equals, rather than a hierarchy with whoever owns the software at the top (in this example, the retailer).

When you caveat all this stuff with “the right permissions “, it sounds kind of okay. I mean, you have to have some faith that the AI is trained properly and that there are enough boundaries and controls in place to signal for human intervention in case it somehow learns the wrong behavior and goes off the rails. That’s still a pretty big leap of faith. However, if you have to lessen those reassurances to any degree, the concept goes from an interesting idea to something bordering on creepy pretty fast. Especially when you get to the part where you’re talking about someone who ordered the most pens of anyone in the company last week getting tagged for procurement training or a triggered review with their manager. Yeah, I get it. But it’s still creepy.

The other challenge with this concept is that it is difficult to explain. I still don’t know that I entirely get it, and I had twice as much exposure as the rest of the audience (during the analyst preview and then at the event itself). Heck, it took me almost 1,000 words to lay it out here. And I’m really not confident that, you know, the Head of Nursing who is bought into the human capital management solution sitting in the main event audience really got it either.

Network-centric solutions can really only work in an AI-driven world. Infor up until last week was notable for not being in the AI game compared to the other majors, particularly IBM. At Inforum, the company announced Coleman, their AI platform, a combination of machine learning, natural language processing, and deep learning. Coleman is the maiden name of Katherine Coleman Johnson, the engineer and mathematician from NASA who was recently featured in the movie Hidden Figures.

The name of Coleman – and of the additional research centers that support Coleman that are named after Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan, the other two women recognized in the film – is very cool. The name came with the support of the Johnson family, which was in the front row when Infor CEO Charles Phillips made the announcement. In a world of Einstein, Watson, and Holmes, it was very refreshing to see not only the thought that went into the name, but the effort that went into securing permission and acknowledging the family legacy in addition to the intellectual legacy involved.

In the analyst Q&A that followed the announcement on the main stage, Duncan Angove, President of Infor, made it clear that Coleman is Infor-specific, not a platform for independent sale. The intent is to be a platform to make the overall Infor platform smarter and more proactive. He threw off another comment during that session that intrigued me, which is that the retail apps on the Infor platform, because they are in a lot of ways net-new (as opposed to adapting from acquisitions), were designed to be AI-centric from the start.

I don’t know what that means. I can guess, I guess. My personal opinion on AI is that it is most valuable when injected into the workflow, as opposed to something that rides alongside. So having solutions that are designed to leave spaces for AI to come in and inject insight or recommendations seems like something important for the future. But is that more than just having a strong workflow / orchestration tool to manage the network of API’s and messages / event flows? That, I don’t know. But I intend to find out.

Infor with its transformation intends to leapfrog enterprise solutions into the next generation of technology. Whether the company achieves that or not remains to be seen. But it’ll be something that I intend to keep track of, for sure.