Mari Cross – Infor

From Russian Dancer to Engineer to Info C-Suite: A Career Built on Systems Thinking

Mari Cross grew up in Russia, where an early aptitude for music and mathematics set the foundation for how she would eventually think about every problem she encountered. She learned languages easily, trained as a dancer, and carried a systems thinking orientation into her engineering career and eventually into Stanford business school. After graduating, she took what she describes as an indirect path through startups, sales, consulting, and strategy work before landing in customer success. Understanding how salespeople, engineers and strategists think has given her a fluency that is rare at the executive level.  She has the instinctive ability to gain insights from different parts of the organization  and connect the dots to deliver business outcomes.

She held senior roles at Adobe, Nielsen, and Gartner before arriving at Infor, drawn specifically by the company’s commitment to a micro-vertical strategy . Having led a verticalized play inside a large organization earlier in her career, she had seen firsthand how difficult it is to drive genuine customer value from a horizontal architecture. Infor’s approach, building products around the specific processes, data models, and best practices of individual industries and sub-industries, struck her as the right answer to a problem the rest of the industry was still struggling to embrace. She joined as Chief Customer Officer and has been building out the framework for effective customer engagement ever since.

Info’s Micro Vertical Strategy & Open Ecosystem to Support Seamless Integration

The concept behind Infor is straightforward even if the execution is not. Rather than building a single horizontal platform and asking every industry to adapt, Infor offers purpose built cloud suites for specific industries defined asmicro-verticals. The difference between discrete and process manufacturing alone illustrates why this matters. Building a solar turbine or a customized aircraft requires managing hundreds of interdependent components arriving simultaneously on a precise schedule. Producing milk or clothing is driven by material quality, butterfat content, and batch consistency. These are fundamentally different process flows, and Cross argues that trying to serve both from the same horizontal architecture forces customers into compromises that compound over time.

One of Infor’s most consequential strategic decisions was to open its architecture to other ERP systems rather than requiring customers to run exclusively on Infor instances. That decision was driven by a clear-eyed view of where AI was headed. AI is fundamentally a data challenge , and a closed architecture limits access to data plus interoperability across systems. For customers like PBC Linear, a Chicago-based manufacturer, that openness made the difference between adoption and rejection, compressing a process that previously took days into roughly minutes and saving approximately three million dollars annually.

The Agentic Advantage and What Enterprises Get Wrong About AI

The most common misconception Mari encounters among enterprise customers is that AI just works, well, not exactly. The technology layer is the part that gets purchased, announced, and celebrated. The last mile, human adoption, change management, or organizational fluency requires businesses to actually extract value from an agentic system. When a company buys agents from multiple vendors and something breaks in one of the agentic flows, the question of who to call becomes genuinely complicated. Cross sees that dynamic as a direct parallel to the best-of-breed IT buying behavior, when organizations accumulated too many disparate point solutions driving integration costs that ultimately exceeded value realization.  

While most vendors are selling the technology required to build a custom agent from scratch, Infor is selling pre-packaged agentic use cases built on top of its micro-vertical process catalogs, with roughly eighty to ninety percent of the automation already configured out of the box. A boat manufacturer using Infor’s agentic functionality was able to automate enough end-to-end process steps that customers began receiving boats faster, with fewer delays. Cross draws the distinction clearly: “Invoice matching is a feature. Boats arriving on time is the outcome. The entire customer success organization is built around that difference”.

Her answer to the last mile problem is a combination of architectural accountability and customer intimacy. Because Infor owns the data, the process catalogs, and the agentic layer on top of both, it can offer end-to-end accountability that a collection of point solutions cannot. Cross argues, “The real competitive moat lies, not in the technology itself but in the institutional knowledge required to deploy it in a way that actually changes how work gets done”.

The Piano, the Puzzle, and the Art of Connecting the Dots

Cross plays piano, and sees the connective tissue between music and enterprise software leadership’ a distinction most would overlook. When you play piano, both hands are working toward a larger sound, the pedal adds another layer, and the music only emerges when you learn to feel the whole thing at once rather than executing each part separately. 

The job itself requires getting comfortable with ambiguity at a pace of change that can be disorienting even for someone who has been doing it for years. Cross has built her team around hiring change makers who share the vision of creating participatory processes where the people closest to customer challenges are involved in building the solutions rather than receiving them top-down, and running hackathons and upskilling programs to keep the organization moving. 

Her advice to the next generation of leaders is to try things on. An indirect path is not a liability. The perspective gained from moving across roles, functions, and industries is not a detour from leadership. It is the preparation for it. The ability to listen to people in different parts of an organization, connect the dots between what they are saying, and translate across those differences is, in her view, one of the most undervalued superpowers in business. It is also, she notes, “Exactly what her mother was doing decades ago at IBM, working in artificial intelligence and linguistics long before the world caught up to what that meant”.