AeraHUB 25 London: Software that 'learns work', not software you learn

Data Wizard 

A new AI-powered Data Wizard from Aera is designed to enable data to be uploaded and categorised appropriately. Users (with no technical training) can upload data and then automatically see it classified and prepared for onward use.

“We pioneered our AI enterprise platform with a vision of changing how work gets done in large enterprises by automating and scaling tactical and routine decisions. We knew this would be critical to freeing people from dull work and enabling human-machine collaboration to speed value and innovation,” said Laluyaux, detailing the launch of his company’s Aera Decision Cloud.

Magical analyst house Gartner predicts that by next year, some 75% of Global 500 companies will apply decision intelligence practices, including the logging of decisions for subsequent analysis. Further, the Gartner soothsayers suggest that by 2028, “at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions” will be made autonomously through agentic AI.

Aera Decision Cloud functions

Aera Workspaces offers tools for decision intelligence, including Aera Discovery, Calc Modeling and Data Views for live data planning and collaboration. Businesses can deploy “what-if” models in complex scenarios and simulations. Aera Control Room helps organisations to track across the network of all decisions and monitor the volume of decisions made and automated.

Laluyaux explains that his firm also has key inventory optimisation capabilities. It does this by sensing and mitigating demand and supply fluctuations to generate recommendations and automate decisions aimed at freeing up working capital by minimising overstocking, reducing product waste and spoilage, preventing inventory markdowns and more.

“Inventory optimization is just one critical area where Aera is helping companies improve supply chain performance,” said Laluyaux. “From the start, we designed Aera as an always-on decision intelligence agent to continually accelerate and optimise enterprise decision-making at scale and unlock new value. Today, decision intelligence is a must-have and Aera is at the forefront  – fueling innovation and measurable outcomes for progressive leaders.”

Laluyaux was previously CEO at planning and performance management company Anaplan Inc and has also worked in senior management positions at SAP.

More COMO than FOMO

Laluyaux opened his keynote session this week by telling the audience that this event was staged in order to help the organisation to further-validate its technology platform proposition. Talking about the current revolution in AI, Laluyaux says that this is the first time we have really worked to “digitise reasoning”, where perhaps our previous use of IT for data management was more focused on data storage and retrieval.

“The ability to anticipate events across the entire value chain is on the one hand super scary, but at the same time it’s super exciting,” said Laluyaux. “The one thing we can be sure of, this is all happening very fast. [Part of] the reason these technologies are taking off so fast is that we can engage with them in natural language. If we think about the rise of the web, the rise of SaaS and the general rise of cloud computing, it generally takes several attempts for a new innovation to really come to market and have their impact – that’s not what’s happening with AI, it’s happening a whole lot more directly.”

It’s not FOMO (fear of missing out), this is what Laluyaux calls COMO i.e. certainty of missing out. 

Last year, Aera executed on 25 million decisions across its platform. Those decisions are made across logistics, revenue, finance, inventory, ordering, demand analysis and what Aera calls the digital control tower.

Adventures with Accenture

Kris Timmermans, glocal lead for supply chain and operations at Accenture, joined Laluyaux on stage for the first of this event’s fireside chats. Timmermans talked about the way supply chains are changing around the world and looked at the growing number of trade restrictions that have existed over the last 15 years. 

“Digitally, in supply chains, we’re not that mature as a business practice – it’s really around 36% today,” explained Timmermans. “So on the road to increasing this number, we’re looking at how and where we can really make changes that add business value. Areas like channel agnostic fulfilment [i.e. being able to get products and services to customers regardless of which channel they procure them through] will be crucial… and this happens alongside an autonomous after sales chain, an integrated planning/nerve centre and circular operations. All of which is driven by the phenomenal evolution of generative AI.”

Timmermans and Laluyaux talked about the way agentic functions could and should now work inside functioning organisations. It may well be prudent for senior (human) staff to be the ones training the agents so that they can absorb as many skills as possible and digitise them and then translate them to the supply chain and the workplace in general.

Gonzalo logic

Aera chief revenue officer Gonzalo Benedit welcomed Sam Mulligan, senior director of digital & lean clinical manufacturing & supply at AstraZeneca on stage alongside Pragati Lodha, in her role as principal at life sciences consulting firm ZS.

Mulligan talked about how AstraZeneca is growing and how its supply chain is evolving to be able to support quality and cost improvements that ultimately help the company deliver the best medicine to patients. Beaucse its shipment data was fragmented across five systems, it was hard for the company to ytack its 90,000 shipments per year… many alerts were generated five days after delivery due dates. Today, AstraZeneca uses Aera to combine 3,000 records to get an end-to-end view of every single active clinical shipment that the company oversees.

Lodha at ZS sais that her organisation is looking for its North Star by defining high-impact use cases with tangible ROI and be able to prototype to be able to deliver quick wins… while still scaling (with an appropriate level of governance) all while insisting on systems for continuous improvement.

“It’s all about being able to understand the difference between the data and the processes [for any given deployment] and being able to make decisions with scalability in mind,” said Lodha. 

Software that learns work

While it is perhaps rare to see an event so centrally focused on technical users showcasing their deployment strategies and methodologies (ServiceNow does this, but most don’t), Aera did pull this off competently. 

Laluyaux says that Aera is all about providing “software that learns how you work, not software that you need to learn in order to make it work” today… and with natural language as the user interface into the platform, that certainly seems to be the case. Aera was called Aera (as a company) because, said Laluyaux, the team wanted a Siri-type word that anyone could pronounce in any language and it is also meant to convey A new ERA for automations and agents and AI across the entire breadth of an organisation.

Fred Laluyaux, co-founder, president and CEO of Aera Technology.