AiThority Interview with Fred Laluyaux, Co-Founder & CEO, Aera Technology

Fred Laluyaux, Co-Founder & CEO, Aera Technology highlights more on the concept of decision intelligence, the benefits of Aera Decision Cloud, how AI is used to power decision intelligence, and more in this interview.

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Hi Fred, tell us about yourself and your tech journey, we’d love to hear the highlights of your time as CEO and President at Aera Technology.

I’m an entrepreneur and technology innovator with a history of founding several successful startups. My entire career has been focused on enterprise software and helping companies perform better with technology.

I started Aera Technology in 2017 with my partner and our CTO Shariq Mansoor because we believed that software and technology could help address very big challenges around sustainability and the future of work. We saw a need for technology to digitize and automate business decision-making – what is now known in the market as decision intelligence.

We knew that one of the key drivers to a better and more sustainable world would be removing human-based inefficiencies and biases from decision-making processes, and breaking the traditional organizational and data silos that continuously hinder performance and make organizations so hard to manage. When we started Aera, there was no market category to support our vision. Early on, we proved  the scalability of our Aera Decision Cloud™ platform among the largest global organizations with the most complex supply chains.

Now the market category for decision intelligence is named, defined, and mainstream adoption is happening. Today, Aera Decision Cloud is empowering worldwide market leaders and their teams with one system of intelligence to advance and accelerate the full spectrum of enterprise decisions.

Can you break down the concept of decision intelligence and why business heads should pay more attention to it?

The digitization of the economy has driven an acceleration of business cycles that has required companies to rethink their technology and processes to respond. We have more decisions to make today than ever before — and much less time to make these and with greater consequences for delayed or unmade decisions. Companies must be able to quickly identify the actions needed and make recommendations and execute decisions in real-time. Most teams can’t keep up with the analysis and decision-making requirements.

Decision intelligence — the digitization, augmentation, and automation of decision-making — enables this.

Decision intelligence isn’t just an upgrade to existing technology systems –  it’s a necessary evolution in how enterprises navigate complexity, drive sustainable growth, and remain competitive.

At its core, it bridges the gap between data and action, enabling businesses to:

• Harmonize and structure data for accurate, real-time visibility
• Uncover patterns, predict outcomes, and recommend actions through AI

It is a transformative approach that marks a departure from traditional decision-making frameworks. By integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning with human expertise, decision intelligence creates a continuous cycle of learning and improvement. This is not just about automation; it’s about augmenting human decision-making capabilities with real-time insights and predictive analytics.

It advances decision-making by explicitly understanding and engineering how decisions are made and how outcomes are evaluated, managed, and improved through feedback. It integrates artificial intelligence, machine learning, and human expertise to automate, augment, and optimize the decision-making process. In addition, it enables companies to shift from reactive to proactive decision-making, empowering their workforces to navigate complexity, drive efficiency, and achieve sustainable growth.

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We’d love to hear more from you about Aera Decision Cloud, how it has evolved, and how it makes decision intelligence more people-centric?

We designed Aera Decision Cloud as a digital agent that works with you to execute decisions. Aera understands the problems you’re facing and delivers real-time, data-driven recommendations that address them.

Aera Decision Cloud is purpose-built to provide a single system of intelligence. Sitting above a company’s data sources and transactional systems, it continuously crawls data without impact to existing systems. It breaks down data and process silos and provides a full view of operations with the tools to enable connected decision-making across multiple dimensions of the business.

Now powered with agentic AI, Aera Decision Cloud enables users to make and orchestrate any type of business decision — from routine, automated decisions with the human out of the loop and on the loop, all the way to situational decisions with the human in the loop — and track the impact of those decisions to continually improve decision-making.

And through generative AI, Aera’s voice and natural language interface offer a truly conversational experience — delivering real-time insights and meaningful recommendations to solve complex challenges, speed decisions, and generate value. With every recommendation, Aera gives you full visibility into the contextual data and intelligence supporting the recommendation, down to the transaction level. Decisions and actions can be executed with a click, tap, or voice command on desktop or via the Aera mobile app.

This is all possible because at its core, Aera is about empowering users. We call it “people-centric” decision intelligence because the focus is on your people. Aera delivers powerful technology that is easy and enjoyable to work with.  It removes dull work, unlocking innovation and creativity. It enables users to quickly adopt and scale automated decision-making across their functions, connecting decisions and achieving new milestones.

How are you seeing AI impact decision-making, can you share a few ways in which global organizations have used AI to power decision intelligence?

At Aera, market leaders are using our technology to unlock millions in working capital, manage demand and supply dynamically, transform customer service, reduce supply chain waste, empower their teams to reimagine work, and more — all through decision intelligence.

A global technology leader is now able to flag obsolescence risks for all parts, not just unique parts, far in advance of end-of-life (EOL). This allows the team to take early, proactive steps to mitigate risks and reduce potential inventory waste, with mitigation actions considering both supply reduction and demand shaping.

One of the largest online, competency-based universities in the U.S. is now able to deliver a scalable solution to improve student outcomes. The university is using decision intelligence to generate data-informed recommendations for its faculty, at critical points in students’ educational journeys, to engage at the right time and in the right ways to improve course completion rates.

A fast-moving consumer goods leader is using decision intelligence to power intelligent demand fulfillment — generating more than eight million forecast combinations by SKU and by store, per day, This level of granularity, previously unattainable, is achieved by ingesting over 1 million data points daily from POS, inventory, and promotions data. The technology dynamically adjusts SKU-day-level forecasts in real-time to bring new value to suppliers and customers across the value chain. The result is a transformed supply chain where forecasts are tightly aligned with actual consumer demand, empowering the company to make faster, more accurate decisions.

A global sustainable steel manufacturer is transforming customer service through dynamic order management, generating recommendations that have led to an increase in on-time delivery of at-risk orders and an impressive 19% increase in the company’s perfect order service metric. These companies and many others are discovering the massive advantages of decision intelligence technology.

How can decision intelligence platforms enable teams to work and collaborate more effectively?

Decision intelligence platforms have the potential to transform work by enabling people to leverage the power of AI and ML to quickly resolve current decision-making problems, continually improve decision-making, and reduce routine or manual work to allow time for strategy and creativity that may not have been possible in the past.

We designed Aera Decision Cloud to bring together critical elements — data, intelligence, automation, and engagement — to enable smarter, faster, more proactive and scalable decision-making across a company’s entire value chain.

Through our people-centric approach, we have also made the technology intuitive and easy to use. This drives the adoption to enable this powerful shift in work.  From one platform, users have the tools to gain visibility across their business, reduce silos, and collaborate more quickly and effectively with their teams to speed and scale decisions — without creating more work or relearning complex technology.

Aera is designed to work with you and teach you how to work. Instead of creating new interfaces for every new problem that users have to solve, Aera provides an Inbox with natural language recommendations — simply accept, reject, or modify and the technology acts on your behalf.

Aera removes all the complexity. However, with our glass box technology, if users need the details — for example, which algorithm is the most efficient to forecast a specific product demand — they are one click from the answer.  And all of our new, and core, features are supported by our decision intelligence control room —  where people learn collectively from every decision made and identify and share best practices across the network. With each new advancement and innovation, we ensure people are at the center of the decision-making experience, multiplying users’ ability to innovate in a structured and controlled way.

In what ways do you feel decision intelligence will transform business operations through 2025 and beyond?

By next year, decision intelligence will become a key pillar in enterprise digital roadmaps to empower teams to transform work and generate new value. Market leaders are already using the technology to achieve new milestones in service, cost reduction, and waste reduction. New roles are also emerging — decision architect, decision engineer, and decision intelligence analyst — to guide the successful adoption and scaling of AI decision automation.

As more companies realize the power of technology in delivering time-to-value and value-over-time, decision intelligence will become the ultimate competitive advantage in talent, sustainability, and profitability.

Beyond 2025, with advancements like agentic AI-powered decision intelligence, we will see the enterprise technology stack evolve to prioritize and orchestrate decision-making. This will result in the emergence of only two primary systems — one system of record for processing transactions and one decision intelligence network for executing tactical and strategic decisions. At Aera, we are already seeing global market leaders initiate these changes.

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A sneak peek into Aera Technology’s roadmap for 2025?

We recently introduced the next evolution of our Aera Decision Cloud platform, delivering innovation that will empower users in 2025 with people-centric decision intelligence.

New capabilities — including Agentic AI, Workspaces, and Control Room — enable users to manage, monitor, control, continuously learn, and improve, as well as accelerate the impact of both structured and situational decisions.

We have created an agentic engine that leverages the LLMs of your choice to more easily and quickly create Aera Skills™ to advance decisions. With the addition of agentic AI, users can build Skills on top of unstructured data, saving the time it takes to make sense of difficult-to-digest information. Through our new Workspaces feature, users can get answers to all their questions with the agent-based chat interface. In real-time with the right security. No hallucinations. Within Workspaces, they can also build their own decision models and do real-time simulations with our new calc engine.  Our control room feature is at the center, enabling users to guide the decisions and monitor and improve how decisions are made. This brings the full power of the decision intelligence network to life. These innovations are one more way we are enabling people to navigate the future of work through decision intelligence.

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