Mari Cross, Chief Customer Officer at Infor, started her session at ELEVATE 2026, the customer value event Ecosystems co-hosts with TSIA, with her own house. If you want an energy-efficient home, you need thick walls, great wiring, good windows, and solar panels. Put a smart thermostat in a 100-year-old house without the rest, she said, and "literally nothing's going to happen."
Infor's customers are in a similar spot. Many want to become agentic enterprises while running systems they've customized for years, and that technical debt slows value realization long before AI enters the picture. "Becoming an agentic enterprise is not the end goal," Mari said. AI "is a means to an end," and the end is value and business outcomes. Her session laid out how Infor clears the way and proves value as it goes.
What Technical Debt Does to Value Realization
Technical debt slows value realization because it keeps customers from getting value out of new software, AI included. It builds up when customers heavily customize their systems. A company that went live eight years ago, Mari said, probably spent four years and $100 million with a big systems integrator, back when "it was not well understood that you should not customize." What's left is inefficient processes, poor data quality, applications built outside the system, and slow adoption of new releases. In the IDC and Gartner research Mari cited, those are the reasons so many customers struggle to get AI off the ground and maintain it, however good the AI is.
"Your end users hate it," Mari said. One customer told her they thought they were using a 20-year-old system. When Infor looked, the cause was processes that were "so awful and difficult and not efficient at all."
Infor works through it with three lenses: help customers optimize, help them adopt what matters, and help them innovate with AI.
Optimize: Scan the Code and Retire What You Don't Need
Infor starts with configuration scans, which use AI to read a customer's code base, compare it with the current release, and find where the customer has extended or customized the software. It pairs that with process mining, which observes how users move through the system and where workflows slow down. Together they become a roadmap for simplifying. Optimization reviews like this used to take heavy services engagements. Now Infor runs them with AI scans.
A large grocery chain, which Mari couldn't name, had moved to the cloud about five years earlier and built applications outside the system for food expiration checks, invoicing, and batch billing. Combined with process mining, the scan showed about 70% of those applications could be retired using functionality Infor had released over the last five years. End users were happier, she said, and "stopped complaining as much."
Adopt: Show the Value Before Asking for the Time
Customers make time for adoption when they can see what it will return. Because Infor is industry-specific, it builds deep telemetry into its systems and benchmarks each customer against industry peers, then points to the features that move the KPIs that customer cares about.
ERP implementations usually take too long and cost too much, Mari said, so by go-live many customers are thinking, "thank God that's done," and stop putting time and energy into what's new. Meanwhile Infor ships new software every six months, so a customer who doesn't adopt falls further behind with each release.
One distributor had a slow order-to-cash process. Infor noticed it hadn't turned on proof of delivery, a fairly simple feature that confirms an order arrived before an invoice goes out. Turning it on let the distributor invoice faster, and its order-to-cash timeline improved by about 30%. "It's adoption, but it's resulting in real value," Mari said.
Innovate: Pick AI Use Cases With a Clear ROI
Infor picks AI use cases for each customer by weighing the return against the cost. Its own customer surveys show why cost matters. Customers said off-the-shelf AI doesn't get them there: it's too horizontal, too hard to implement, and they don't understand the systems. Three in four said they don't understand the long-term costs.
Infor's response is the AI Adoption Hub, an engagement tool that pulls together the configuration scans, process mining, adoption data, and input from customer success teams and from customers themselves. It builds a list of the highest-value AI use cases a customer can put into production quickly, each with a view of the ROI and the cost.
A boat manufacturer put it to work. Boat makers compete on the customer service experience, so this one paid for expedited shipping on a lot of orders to make sure each boat arrived on time. Process mining showed the real problem was workflows that ran too slowly. Infor found three areas to apply AI and automation, and production became faster and more predictable. Expedited shipping costs fell by 50%.
Can Value Realization Scale Without More People?
Infor is scaling value realization by building it into the product, with people still in the loop. Today everything Mari described runs through Infor's solution architects, industry specialists, and services teams, and "it's still manual effort." So Infor is building Infor Value Intelligence, a self-service tool native to its architecture that gives each customer a single view of value when they want it. The goal, Mari said, is to "scale the insight and intelligence to all of the customers that we have," not to replace Infor's high-touch approach.
"When you think about an agentic enterprise, it's really humans and technology working side by side."
—Mari Cross, Chief Customer Officer, Infor
"It's a self-service tool, but it doesn't mean that we leave them alone," Mari said. Customers can raise a hand for help, and Infor's success teams can reach out when they see interest.
Mari expects the payoff to reach past customer success. As the tool gets more precise, she said, what it learns will inform Infor's product teams, go-to-market, and marketing messaging. The vision, in her words, is to "put value and control in the hands of the customers while of course driving retention and expansion for Infor."
Infor can build this into its own product because, as an industry-specific ERP vendor, it already collects deep telemetry and peer benchmarks. Few GTM teams have that kind of data. For them, the practical version of Mari's approach is keeping the value case and the realized value in one closed-loop system of record that customer success can share with the customer. That's the system Ecosystems is built to provide.
Watch the Session
Watch Mari's full ELEVATE 2026 session to hear the rest of her optimize, adopt, and innovate examples. For the themes that ran through the whole day, read our ELEVATE 2026 recap, Closing the Promise Gap.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is value realization?
Value realization is the measurable business result a customer gets after buying software. At Infor, Chief Customer Officer Mari Cross ties it to three kinds of work: optimizing heavily customized systems, driving adoption of the features that move a customer's KPIs, and putting AI use cases into production with a clear view of the return and the cost.
What is technical debt in enterprise software?
In Mari Cross's description, technical debt builds up when customers heavily customize their systems. It shows up as inefficient processes, poor data quality, applications built outside the system, and slow adoption of new releases. Citing IDC and Gartner research, she said these problems are why so many customers struggle to implement and maintain AI, however good the AI solution is.
How does Infor use process mining?
Process mining observes how users move through Infor's systems and where workflows slow down. Infor combines it with AI scans of a customer's code to build an optimization roadmap. For one boat manufacturer, process mining showed that slow workflows were driving expedited shipping costs, and AI and automation in three areas cut those costs by 50%.
Why do customers delay adopting new software features?
Many customers are worn out after a long ERP implementation and stop investing once they go live, while new releases keep arriving every six months. Infor's approach is to show the value first. It benchmarks customers against industry peers and points to the features that move the KPIs they care about. Turning on proof of delivery improved one distributor's order-to-cash timeline by about 30%.
Keep the Conversation Going
The conversations that started at ELEVATE continue all year with peers who are solving the same problems. Join the Customer Value Community to be part of them. And if you'd like to see how teams use Ecosystems to show customers the value they're getting, talk to our team.
