Every year, Infor Service Industries Connect offers a useful gut-check: not just on where Infor’s roadmap is headed, but on where the broader ecosystem of customers, partners, and competitors is moving. This year’s conference was no exception.
The Surety Systems team was on the ground for it all, and we made it a priority to be part of as many conversations as possible. Staying close to these conversations is core to how we work, making sure our Infor guidance reflects where the ecosystem is headed, not just where it is for our core clients. Here’s what stood out.
AI Has Moved From Keynote Topic to Embedded Capability
If there was one thread running through nearly every track at this year’s conference, it was that AI is no longer confined to a single dedicated conversation; it’s showing up everywhere. Finance, HR, customer service, and workforce management all featured their own take on applied AI, and the pattern was consistent across every one of them: AI has stopped being a keynote topic and started being infrastructure.
The clearest evidence of that shift is Velocity Suite. It bundles process mining, RPA, intelligent automation, and generative AI natively into the CloudSuite environment, at a single flat rate rather than the typical per-bot or per-transaction pricing for enterprise AI adoption. It gives organizations a better way to move from “we think our processes work” to ongoing operational improvement in day-to-day CloudSuite workflows.
Just as telling was a broader emphasis on governance: citations, audit trails, and guardrails around how AI-generated outputs get used. That’s a conversation about how to govern GenAI once it’s already in use, and it lines up with a new observability capability in Velocity Suite: Inline Thoughts, which surfaces an AI agent’s reasoning path directly in the interface so teams can audit how a prediction was actually generated. Taken together, this is the real signal from this year’s conference: the conversation has shifted from “what is GenAI” to “which use cases are worth deploying, and how do we govern them responsibly.” That governance question is where buyers actually are right now.
Cloud Migration Momentum and the Discipline to Operate Once You’re There
A large share of this year’s content was aimed at Lawson v10 and S3 organizations still working through their move to the cloud. These sessions and keynotes featured migration playbooks, tooling to accelerate data migration, cloud-readiness prep for finance and supply chain applications, and testimonials from organizations already through the migration process.
Single-tenant GHR migration is a good example of just how real this challenge is. Many organizations are wrestling with the same problem: single-tenant environments built around highly customized configurations, years of accumulated integrations, and organization-specific business rules that don’t translate cleanly into a multi-tenant setup. It’s shaping up to be a defined practice area, and we’ve built a repeatable methodology for the data migration, integration remapping, and change management work these projects consistently demand.
Equally telling was a broader focus on managing the ongoing pace of cloud updates, and the infrastructure work behind it, including continued investment in faster, more real-time data warehousing and querying underneath CloudSuite. Organizations aren’t just asking “how do we get to the cloud” anymore; they’re asking, “how do we operate once we’re there,” absorbing a continuous stream of updates without disrupting the business. That two-phase framing, migrate first, then build the discipline to absorb continuous change, ended up being one of the strongest trends of this year’s conference.
Automating the Unglamorous Core of Finance
Reconciliation quietly dominated more conversations than almost any other single topic this year, covering cash and account reconciliation, invoice processing, capital project reconciliation, close management, and process mining. This emphasis reflects exactly where CFOs are feeling the most manual-effort pain, and exactly where the ROI of automating it is easiest to measure.
The theme came through loud and clear: stop reconciling, start running. That matches what we’re seeing directly in client conversations. We’re seeing real momentum around this specific area of work, with organizations increasingly focused on shrinking the close cycle and leveraging more of the finance modules already available to them. If AI and cloud migration are the headline themes of this year’s conference, this is the quieter one that’s driving budget conversations right now.
Self-Service Opportunities and User Empowerment
The user empowerment theme ran across two related dimensions: self-service analytics and employee self-service. The underlying logic is the same in both cases: push capability out of IT and into the hands of the people actually doing the work.
On the analytics side, that showed up in a continued investment in self-service reporting tools and spreadsheet-based reporting, along with a broader push toward operational reporting built for core finance users. On the employee side, it showed up in a more unified HR and workforce management experience, including time attestation and mobile scheduling, all aimed at giving employees and managers more direct control over their day-to-day tasks.
Whether you’re a finance analyst building your own report or an employee managing your own schedule from your phone, the direction is the same: less waiting on someone else, more doing it yourself, inside a system built to support that.
Workforce Management Is a Wave, Not a Deal-by-Deal Trend
WFM has been an active theme across multiple regional and national health systems, most of them evaluating or migrating in response to the UKG Workforce Central (WFC) sunset – cloud-hosted support ended in December 2025, and on-premises support ends March 31, 2027. When many organizations are independently reaching the same inflection point at the same time, it’s a market signal worth planning around, not a coincidence.
The WFC sunset isn’t just a scheduling and timekeeping decision; it forces organizations to rethink integrations with payroll, HR, and clinical staffing systems all at once, often on a compressed timeline they didn’t choose for themselves. For health systems, where staffing complexity and compliance requirements are already high, that combination tends to turn what looks like a straightforward platform swap into a much larger workforce transformation effort.
If your organization is facing a WFC transition, the time to treat it as a workforce transformation, rather than a platform swap, is before the March 2027 deadline chooses the timeline for you.
Let’s Talk
Infor’s ecosystem is moving fast, with trends like AI becoming embedded infrastructure, cloud migration shifting into an operating discipline, finance automation gaining real momentum, self-service reshaping how work gets done, and the WFM wave building underneath it all. If any of these apply to your organization, now is the time to act on them.
Contact our Infor team today to chat about your Infor roadmap and how to turn these market shifts into an advantage for your organization.
