Infor has announced the general availability of its Infor Coleman Digital Assistant, which is designed to help maximise human work potential by enabling natural language extensibility and accessibility of Infor CloudSuite. At its annual Inforum customer conference, the company also introduced its Infor Coleman AI Platform for embedded machine learning models, which it expects to deliver in the Spring of 2019.
The Infor Coleman Digital Assistant is the first in a series of new products rolled out under the Coleman AI umbrella and provides a conversational interface to the Infor OS platform, the underlying foundation of Infor CloudSuite. It offers custom skill building, a voice user experience (UX) and navigation, and natural language processing (NLP) extensibility.
As a digital assistant, Coleman uses a conversational UX and NLP – with deep domain and industry knowledge – to chat, hear, talk, and in the future, it is expected to analyse images.
Rick Rider, Infor Coleman Product Director, said, “According to research from McKinsey & Company, the average interaction worker spends nearly 20 per cent of their time looking for information or tracking down colleagues for help with specific tasks. With the ability to quickly source data, automate repetitive processes, and help optimise workflows, Coleman can improve the work experience and help make workers more productive. This can result in significant savings for organisations.”
The Infor Coleman Digital Assistant is also expected to be integrated with Amazon Alexa for Business – which provides tools to manage Alexa devices, enroll users, and configure skills with added security across those devices – by the end of 2018.
The assistant will be available, upon GA, to Infor OS customers, and example skills will be available, at Inforum, from product suites such as Infor CloudSuite Distribution (CSD), Infor CloudSuite Industrial, Infor CRM, Infor LN, Infor M3, Infor CloudSuite Financials and Supply Management (CSF/FSM), and Infor Global Human Resources (GHR), among others.
The Infor Coleman AI Platform is a pervasive machine learning platform that operates below an application’s surface. It mines data and uses machine learning to help improve processes such as inventory management, transportation routing, and predictive maintenance.
The platform is specifically designed for non-technical, business users and is built upon a foundation of industry-specific data. The Infor Coleman AI modeling environment doesn’t require as complex of a skillset as other AI tooling, nor is it designed to require an exhaustive service engagement.
“The Infor Coleman AI Platform can help customers better analyse their data and give them the ability to start asking questions they didn’t even know they should be asking. It can automate tasks that were error-prone, which can help organisations save money by avoiding certain issues or taking advantage of specific opportunities more quickly,” said Rider.