Aera Defines Path For Scaling ‘Decision Intelligence’

Aera Technology is known for its eponymously named technology, Aera, an AI-powered decision intelligence offering for automating real-time operational decisions. The company staged its “decision intelligence global summit” (known as AeraHUB to its friends) on October 27 & 28, 2026, in New York City.

Positioned democratically for relevance across business teams, software engineering units and data science groups, Aera pinpoints risks and opportunities in dynamic real-time business scenarios. It also recommends and executes actions (as you would expect in the age of agentic automation) and builds decision intelligence capabilities across business functions spanning finance, supply chain, procurement and other central business pillars.

Speaking at AeraHUB keynotes on both days of this event, Fred Laluyaux, co-founder & CEO of Aera Technology, explained how his organization is now working to help customers scale decision intelligence from the point where they identify their first win… all the way through to capitalizing processes for wider and ongoing scaled enterprise advantage.

Speaking on the banks of the Hudson River, Laluyaux explained what separates the enterprises running decision intelligence across the value chain from those still stuck in one pilot. He looked at how the sequence runs that turns a first win into a compounding advantage, and how the loop closes so every decision makes the next one better.

Readiness, Impact & Data

“Readiness, impact (of technology on the way we work today) and where to start with decision intelligence are the three topics that we keep coming back to,” said Laluyaux. “When firms look at whether they are ready for decision intelligence, the first topic that always comes up is data… and a few years back the answer was that firms are not sure; but today we do know that most firms today have deployed data lakes, so we do know that (for most firms) the data is indeed there across ERP systems and other systems of record inside the business.”

Laluyaux further drilled into the need for firms to think about systems and processes; he highlighted how processes are glued between people (more importantly than connections to machines) and so recognized where stakeholders are in the business and what role they play in total business execution. When firms think about their data, systems and processes, the CEO said teams need to pinpoint the right protocols to actually execute decisions inside the business. He said that “recommendations are all very well”, but if the recommendations aren’t correct, then firms don’t get to travel down that last mile and connect a decision intelligence system to a (for example) procurement or ordering system.

“Lastly then, when firms look at their people and try to decide whether they are ready to move forward towards decision intelligence, sometimes organizations will need to push initiatives forward and make sure people are driven towards this new way of working. This will be easier on tasks that require low or medium complexity, but if a task is only understood by (let’s say) five people in the company and is highly complex, then these tasks have to be executed as well,” said Laluyaux.

Openness & Transparency At The Center

The way to do this is to make systems open and transparent so that users can see how decision logic is being approached and executed… and this is important if users are going to be able to feel that the decision is still one that they own.

“As you digitize the work inside a business, the tools that any given organization will use will also change. If a firm has a system of record and a system of intelligence on top, that will naturally change over time; i.e., there will be a flattening inside the organization so that the tiers of hierarchy are reduced as we reduce the distance between decisions and intelligence,” explained Laluyaux. “We will end up putting people in charge of entire end-to-end value chains, rather than smaller component parts of a process in a silo somewhere. This all allows organizations to set their goals in a much more dynamic way.”

Six New Aera Skills

In terms of product news, Aera used the conference to introduce six new services in agentic decision intelligence, all designed to accelerate how enterprises build, govern, and scale automated decision-making. The capabilities connect decisions across the value chain, turn business challenges into repeatable decision automation, and capture and retain the knowledge, policies, and outcomes behind every decision. Together, Aera suggests they “advance the shift to a decision-centric enterprise” today, where decisions are continuously optimized and executed to drive measurable business outcomes.

Building a decision intelligence skill used to take specialist tools, training, and developer time. Now users can start with a business challenge in plain language (using commands such as “build a skill that flags at-risk suppliers”), prompt Aera to develop a plan, review and refine the proposed approach, approve it, and turn it into governed decision automation, often within a single working session. Skills are created, refined, and updated by talking to Aera rather than by configuring tools, so organizations can continuously adapt and improve decisions as business needs change.

Aera Decision Ledger creates a persistent, traceable record of every decision, whether made in Aera or sent from another system through Aera’s API, capturing the business context, reasoning, policies evaluated, actions, and outcomes behind each one. Aera spots decisions made in conversation and asks a person to confirm them. By bringing structured and situational decisions into a common record, it preserves institutional knowledge, supports audit and review, and makes past decisions and their outcomes available to inform future decisions.

Policy Studio enables organizations to turn enterprise policies into rules that govern decisions as they are made. Teams upload a policy document or describe a rule in plain language, and Aera drafts the rules for a person to approve. Rules can be tested against live decisions before enforcement; once active, they apply consistently across relevant decision types and can block a decision, require approval, or warn. The results of policy evaluations are captured in Decision Ledger, providing traceability and evidence of how decisions were governed.

Agent Interoperability, Connected Decision Intelligence

New interoperability capabilities enable Aera to work with existing enterprise agents and tools, including Microsoft Copilot Studio, external agents through Agent2Agent (A2A), and external tools through Model Context Protocol (MCP). This allows organizations to bring Aera’s decision intelligence into existing workflows, reuse AI investments, and connect agents with the business context, governance, and execution capabilities needed to drive enterprise outcomes.

Dynamic UX enables users to create and adapt experiences using natural-language prompts and Aera’s own charts, tables, recommendations, and action items, then publish them as part of a skill. Dynamic UX delivers a redesigned Aera experience that puts skills at the center and makes them rich and interactive, moving beyond the traditional recommendation inbox. This makes it easier to tailor how people interact with decision intelligence based on their roles and the decisions they need to make.

Aera Command Center provides visibility into decision activity, performance, and business impact enterprise-wide. It covers every type of decision: structured and situational, augmented and automated. It helps organizations monitor decisions, understand their outcomes, and identify opportunities to improve performance as decision intelligence scales.

A Day In The Life (of a Decision Architect)

Laurent Lefouet, chief strategy officer, Aera Technology, presented a session entitled “A day in the life of a decision architect: building skills with Aera” to really put some color into how the company’s technology works.

Detailing what it takes to build a complete skill, Lefouet explained how Aera users will see skills created as they define calculations and start to build the structure of calculations that eventually populate the decision object as the data is mapped into its point of action. The final end-to-end objects that are created for any given skill are then visible to that the user can see the full data-compute-recommendation box-actions process planner, which Aera presents as visual flow-chart (almost UML-like) diagram with flowing dots to show the full anatomy of a skills and the direction in which it works.

NOTE: All that said (and the above is presented as the deep dive explanation of how Aera’s Technology works), there has been a concerted and focused effort from the company to simplify the user experience across the board, and this is evident in all the use cases on show at this conference.

What If, I Make Changes…?

Extended parts of Lefouet’s session examined the process steps undertaken when users want to further edit and extend or change skills. Further, there are “what if” screens for users to explore the likely impact of further changes so that they can explore the option for wider and better returns.

Other elements at AeraHUB 2026 included analysis sessions designed to explain how to build a differentiated, customer-centric supply chain. Avantor VP of supply chain Jared Guckenberger shared how the company moved from vision to value, the skills driving results today, and the plan to scale autonomous decision-making across a global supply chain.

Mary Taylor, VP supply chain, and Brian O’Connor, digital enablement director at Kerry Group, were in conversation with Gonzalo Benedit, CRO, Aera Technology, to discuss how Kerry Group deployed agentic decision intelligence, automating thousands of decisions, saving significant time and effort, mitigating waste, and reducing supply chain risk by millions of dollars.

In a sciences value chain session, Aera explored how decision intelligence can connect data, domain knowledge, predictive and optimization models, and agentic AI to support decisions ranging from strategic planning to day-to-day operations. Aera showed how decision intelligence works in areas such as clinical development and supply, manufacturing and network decisions, inventory, and supply chain optimization.

Balancing Agentic Reasoning & Deterministic Execution

Aera is built to let users make plans and evaluate situational decisions. It’s all about how teams can balance agentic reasoning with more predictable, lower-cost deterministic execution.

Beyond individual use cases, Aera used this event to examine what it takes to move from isolated analytics and AI solutions towards a scalable decision-centric approach, where technology augments human judgment and enables organizations to continuously sense, decide, and act.

The takeaways from this event were many and varied. It might sound like it’s stating the obvious, but if organizations don’t embrace AI to the fullest and use decision intelligence technologies such as those showcased by Aera, then they won’t be in the winners circle going forward.

AeraHUB 2026 highlighted Aera Technology’s push to scale agentic decision intelligence across enterprise value chains and, of course, showcased its six new automated services. While these tools promise to streamline complex workflows and flatten hierarchies through real-time execution, successfully implementing them remains challenging.

Analysts point out that moving from isolated AI pilots to enterprise-wide adoption requires overcoming organizational inertia, fragmented data, and concerns about AI transparency and trust. Ultimately, organizations must balance the speed and scale of AI-driven decision-making with human oversight and governance to deliver measurable business value.