AI Sourcing: Have Your Bot Call Mine

Artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities are showing up in a variety of business apps, promising a panacea for those who want someone else to do the writing, drawing, thinking — who want someone else to do the work. At its best, though, AI has the capacity to shift workers, and especially supply chain workers, from mundane repetitive tasks to more strategic endeavors. That’s where the biggest gains really exist.

The marriage of AI and supply chain is so intuitively obvious that the list of procurement and logistics tasks that might be enhanced or shifted by it is long: demand forecasting, inventory planning and management, production planning, predictive forecasting, sourcing supply network design, transportation routing, warehouse management, order fulfillment, customer service and risk management. Market pundits, meanwhile, see a market that is set to grow substantially. The global AI-in-supply-chain market size is expected to be worth around $157.6 billion by 2033, according to Market.us, from $4.5 billion in 2023. The average growth rate during the forecast period is expected to be 42.7 percent.

It’s not surprising. AI promises to give supply chain and logistics professionals ways to solve complex problems, automate tasks, optimize decisions, enhance performance and create value in ways that will help the bottom line. By reducing risk, raising the accuracy of business predictions and optimizing supply chain management activities, AI can reduce cost and increase operational resiliency. Rather than engaging in repetitive tasks that are readily automated, then, procurement pros can focus on driving innovation and capturing competitive advantage by capturing trends, patterns and insights from supply chain data.

Andrew Moeller, Flip Electronics

To get from the idea of an AI-driven supply chain to the reality, though, is a complex challenge.  The task includes a variety of activities including:

• Learning new technologies (such as Large Language Models such as ChatGPT, Bard and Llama) and tools (such as CoPilot, Dali and Gemini). New solutions are emerging daily.
• Rethinking workflows to make the most of the technologies and capabilities of AI.
• Retraining employees and redefine roles to make sure that individuals can focus on high-value activities.
• Addressing data quality to ensure that intelligence inputs provide useful results.

As an added benefit, OEMs can count on AI transforming the relationships that they have with sales professionals, vendors and distribution partners. Ideally, these partners will be able to use AI to quickly sort through business requests to allow them to collaborate more closely with key customers.  In short, if you are a good customer, you’ll get more attention from your partners — and more general opportunities will get routed to junior sales folks or automated systems.

If you aren’t thinking about AI in the supply chain yet, it’s time to start. Done right, it can enhance your operations with better efficiency, high quality and more resilience.

To read the article on EPSNews, click here: https://epsnews.com/2024/06/10/ai-sourcing-have-your-bot-call-mine/