AI is playing an increasingly important role in the supply chain industry, enabling companies to optimize and streamline their operations in many areas.
For example, predictive analytics can help businesses forecast demand for products and services, allowing them to make better decisions about inventory levels, production schedules, and delivery routes. Intelligent forecasting is also built on AI algorithms that analyze data such as weather, economic trends, and consumer behavior to help businesses plan better inventory.
Automation is another area of AI growth, where many supply chain processes such as order fulfillment, inventory management, and logistics will require less staffing, saving time and money. AI can also monitor the quality of products as they move through the supply chain, inspecting products for defects and anomalies.
AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are enabling businesses to provide better customer service and enhance the customer experience. In fact, there is a huge technology ecosystem built around the application of AI technology across all aspects of business, including the supply chain.
One such organization is UST Global. UST Global is a multinational digital transformation company that provides IT services and solutions to various industries including healthcare, banking, financial services, retail and high tech.
UST has its own supply chain operations, headed by lead consultant Jonathan Koolhauer. Colehauer speaks on the digital transformation of the supply chain at his LIVE event in Procurement and Supply Chain.
In March 2022, UST announced a strategic partnership with AI enterprise software company o9 Solutions to provide effective supply chain management solutions and drive the digital transformation of enterprise clients. o9 Solutions uses planning and decision software to enable organizations to accelerate the digital transformation of their supply chain functions and drive the digital transformation of their integrated planning and operations functions.
The company’s move epitomizes how the supply chain technology ecosystem is responding to the supply needs of companies. The partnership will combine UST’s expertise in systems integration and strategic knowledge with o9’s AI-powered supply, revenue, profit and loss planning and decision-making platform.
But UST also has its own deep AI expertise in the form of Dr. Adnan Masood, Chief AI Officer and Lead Architect. Masood is also a visiting fellow at Stanford University. Few people are more qualified to discuss the importance of AI to business in general and supply chains in particular.
Speaking to an audience at an AI conference in London, Massoud discussed the business use of AI, “how we can create a repeatable approach to processes through an organizational ecosystem and use it to transfer information.” summed up to be
Using AI to mine such processes requires “multiple intelligent components working in multiple modalities,” he says.
He said it’s enterprise AI and a building block of UST’s platform called SmartOps. This is “powerful automation,” Massoud said.
He further adds: “SmartOps is an AI-powered intelligent operations platform built on the automation pillars of knowledge management, intelligent monitoring, and autonomous operations.
UST SmartOps is an AI-powered cognitive automation platform that holistically learns and rethinks business processes while intelligently digitizing and compressing manual workflows. ”
SmartOps running on AWS works across business and IT operations, including help desks and onboarding tools. Optimize all procurement and supply chain management, from shipment tracking and bill payments to contract management and ESG compliance.
“Business is evolving faster than ever, and to sustain this, we need to focus on high-impact priorities,” Masoud told the audience. “But given the backlog of data, internal processes and never-ending administrative tasks, it can be challenging.
“Many companies are looking for products that solve this challenge, but one-size-fits-all technology solutions do not take into account the uniqueness of every business.”
Masood added that he and his colleagues at UST combine strategic business expertise with knowledge management, automation and AI to “unleash human ingenuity in the enterprise.”
“When it comes to your business, there is no greater benefit than encouraging employee ingenuity,” he said, adding, “By reimagining how your business operates, your employees can have the greatest impact.” It allows us to focus on the most relevant opportunities,” he added.
He explains that AI-driven technology works by “learning your process and decision-making framework” and “mapping how parts of your business are connected.”
UST, which is typical of many AI platforms for supply chains and other fields, also mimics learned decision-making patterns “to execute processes with optimal speed and accuracy,” Masood said. . “It also starts suggesting insights that will drive revenue for your business.”
He said UST used the AI-driven solution to achieve “tangible business results within 90 days” and “reduced operating costs for a global enterprise by 30% in the first year.”
Interestingly, Masood says properly embedded AI doesn’t even feel like AI.
“As enterprise software companies incorporate seamless AI into their applications as part of their machine learning stacks, even though these cognitive components are automating workflows, they are so organic that it doesn’t feel like AI. Become.”
Massoud also told the audience that the demand for machine learning professionals has far outstripped supply, and that in recent years “great progress has been made in the development of user-friendly machine learning algorithms” to address this gap. .
He added, “With automated ML capabilities, even non-experts can apply automated machine learning to ‘lighten the burden and workload.
He said this is all part of “democratizing AI,” another element of which is “reinforcement learning.”
“Reinforcement learning is a semi-supervised learning model that allows agents to take action and interact with their environment,” he says.
He added that reinforcement learning use cases include personalized recommendations and “anything that requires an intelligent loop of comprehension and learning.”
Massoud’s last words on AI were, “It’s a team sport.”
“Business units, technology groups and research teams all work together to deliver business results.
“This is the key message: every component of AI aims to deliver consistent business outcomes.”
