10 Tips for Deploying AI in Your Supply Chain
Artificial intelligence can transform the supply chain. Because the infrastructure already exists, adoption can be quick—though it can be challenging to know where to start.
1. Build a Cross-Functional AI Council. AI is not merely an IT project. Just as it will transform every industry, it will impact every department in your company. From the beginning, involve leaders from operations, finance, legal teams and HR to ensure holistic investment.
2. Return to Your Mission Statement. Establish clear pillars to define your AI investments; this helps ensure buy-in and success. Start by identifying use cases that align with your company’s core vision. Balance your customer-centric goals—such as profit and efficiency—with your internal goals, for instance employee well-being and engagement.
3. Establish Governance and Ethics Early. Before deploying anything, define clear policies for data privacy, security, and algorithmic bias to ensure your AI’s decisions are fair, compliant, and trustworthy. All key department leaders should help determine this as well.
4. Shift the Narrative Internally. Like all major organizational shifts, your employees must embrace AI for it to be successful. Directly challenge the thought “AI is going to take my job.” Help reframe your employees thinking of AI as an enabler, not a replacement, through educational training and change management.
5. Ensure Data is AI-Ready. Clean data without context is just as good as bad data when it comes to informing AI models. The real step zero is establishing a standardized, canonical data model that structures all of your data from different customers, vendors, or other partners in the same way. This is essential for scaling AI solutions.
6. Prioritize Employee Well-Being and Safety. Again, counter the narrative of AI replacing jobs by putting your employees first. Deploy AI tools to help your workforce. For example, there are tools that can monitor the ergonomics of employees as they lift large objects. These tools provide real-time alerts to help prevent injury.
7. Deploy AI to Elevate Human Work. Checklist style work is the true sweet spot for AI. Use AI to eliminate monotonous tasks, and free employees to focus on high-value exceptions and intelligent problem-solving. For example, instead of having an employee manually type data from a paper document, AI can read a photo of the data and populate it to a system in seconds.
8. Translate “System-Speak” into Natural Language. Computers have their own language, but AI can help humans and technology meet in the middle. For example, rather than a confusing error code, an employee gets a clear message such as, “The order is not processed because the ZIP code you entered isn’t valid.” This information empowers the employee to understand and fix problems immediately.
9. Pilot New AI with Existing Customers or Partners. We are all navigating how AI will shape supply chain operations. Give your customers or partners a seat at the table and co-invest in AI with them. You already have historical, contextual data from long-term partners to apply to an AI model, which can lead to more positive and accurate outcomes.
10. Target High-ROI Automation. Identify where slight improvements could yield massive cost savings or efficiency advancements. Small breakthroughs in dynamic route optimization or inventory optimization, for example, can cause a chain reaction, improving not just one element, but your entire supply chain.
SOURCE: Shibu Raj, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer,
GEODIS in Americas