Aera Technology  announced the general availability of the Aera Cognitive Operating System, the world’s first cloud platform for Cognitive Automation. In extending availability beyond current customers and partners, including Merck, RB, and Unilever, Aera meets the growing need of companies whose operations have been impacted by changing or uncertain market conditions.

“We’ve worked with the world’s largest organizations and complex supply chains to demonstrate the value of Cognitive Automation at scale. This tight collaboration has enabled us to build the Aera Cognitive Operating System™, which is now easy to implement and scale, and therefore available to an even wider range of companies,” said Frederic Laluyaux, CEO of Aera Technology.

Alessandro de Luca, CIO of Healthcare, Merck Group, noted, “We are all running on much shorter cycles in this dynamic world, and it is impossible to process everything manually or on legacy systems. Aera’s Cognitive Operating System™ has made a real difference in our ability to implement and operate a best-in-Class IBP process. This, combined with the fact that we could rely on a single, intelligent source of truth, gave us a springboard to agility.”

“Cognitive Automation plays a large role in the 4th industrial revolution,” said Nokuthula Lukhele, Project Lead, Data, and Digital Transformation, World Economic Forum. “The future of agility needs to be at the edge of decision making, and these technologies enable that,” she added.

The Aera Cognitive Operating System™ augments and enhances human decisions, providing a centralized corporate brain – adding agility to enterprise systems. By applying data crawling, machine learning, and industry models, Aera’s system makes real-time recommendations, predicts outcomes, and acts autonomously to aid complex decisions – from inventory optimization and touchless planning to order management and trade promotions.

“There is a limit of what the human mind can do with the volume of data and analytics needed to optimize a supply chain,” said Bish Sen, Head of Supply Chain Beauty & Personal Care, Transformation, Planning & Engineering at Unilever. “This is where agility is more important than accuracy, and Cognitive Automation can help unlock those levels of agility.”

“Designing and managing a supply chain that balances customer service, cost, and resiliency requires a model that constantly measures and reacts to value at risk. Kearney’s Sense & Pivot approach, combined with Aera’s Cognitive Operating System™, provides a proven solution agile enough to respond to this challenge by delivering real-time Cognitive Automation at scale for corporate boards and supply chain leaders.” – Suketu Gandhi, Partner, Global Leader – Digital Supply Chain, Kearney.