Are Humans in “The Loop” of Your Future-fit Strategy?

The acceleration of generative and agentic AI and large language models (LLM) in the past couple of years has given well-heeled entrepreneurial spirits confidence they can leapfrog existing solutions. The ambition has merit.

GenAI’s swift introduction to the corporate consciousness has upended the “bleeding edge, leading edge, and fast/first follower” paradigm that long governed technology adoption.

This isn’t the RFID Rubicon some companies explored, then crossed, two decades ago. Hype largely exceeded reality. Even blockchain has taken a back seat as supply chain organizations inevitably realize they need to prioritize digitizing analog processes—i.e., paper bills of lading—before they can even entertain distributed ledger protocol.

Today’s challenge is markedly different because the pace of transformation, and the risk of not reacting to these AI step-changes, is considerable.

I recall listening to Kraft-Heinz regale the audience at Gartner’s 2023 Supply Chain Symposium with how a risk management startup released a new software version in a matter of weeks, not months or quarters.

Importantly, GenAI is both a means and an end. That it can create synthetic data to train and test algorithms, alone, has become a game changer for software development. In terms of an end game, wait-and-see politicking and stakeholder misalignment quickly open the door to competitive disruption—especially when it comes to people strategy.

Process Automation and a Case for Supply Chain Authority

Consultant speak thrives during periods of uncertainty and ambiguity. Over the past decade we’ve been introduced to countless buzzwords and acronyms intended to make sense of this new normal. Internet of things, process automation, blockchain, digital twins and threads, control towers, and agentic AI are now ubiquitous terms bandied about in text chains. In truth, they all capture the same Holy Grail aspiration—near-autonomous supply chain management (transportation included).

This reckoning picked up speed with the emergence of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

For context, in 2017 I helped manage CPG manufacturer Unilever’s first supply chain pilots in task discovery, process mining, and RPAs. At the time, this tech was still novel in an operational context. Reductively, RPAs are “enterprise macros on steroids,” band-aid connectors meshing together disparate systems that don’t integrate with one another.

In the early days, RPAs often broke when processes changed. AI has since addressed these continuity glitches. Still, the real value in this work was always the process mining data. It took the emotion out of human subjectivity, pointing to work that was redundant, repetitive, and consuming a lot of human bandwidth.

Keeping the Pace

It also exposed an underlying problem within supply chain organizations today. Human Resources (HR) as a function isn’t keeping pace with rampant business transformation.

While it’s true supply chain is no longer simply a cost center and that the C-suite increasingly recognizes its importance as a competitive enabler, corporate culture changes at a glacial pace. In many companies, finance, sales & marketing, R&D, brand, and even HR call the shots. Supply chain follows the lead.

That’s why it’s incumbent upon supply chain and IT leaders to insist that HR embeds in their conversations about new technology to understand how it impacts roles, teams, and organizational culture. There needs to be greater collaboration happening within the work, not just between disparate functions outside the loop.

“How Do You Do Digital Co-worker?”

Back to the Silicon Valley automation startup. In closing our conversation, we ruminated about the future of back-office operations. After I dizzied him with visions of an interactive supply chain digital twin and automated what-if “decision trees,” he framed it as humans working side-by-side digital colleagues. Think about that for a moment. Does the matter-of-factness strike you like it did me?

Robots and collaborative robots (cobots) are common sights in industrial spaces, where automation has become an expectation, less the exception. But in a world of cubicles this demarcation between humans and automatons is less finite.

It started with RPAs, then matriculated to AI agents on desktops. What’s next?

Expectedly, companies are guarded with how they couch these transformations. They don’t want to tip their cap to what’s really happening. Whether it’s human in, on, or outside the loop, it’s disingenuous to suggest “we’re not looking to replace people.” Just look at the daily news cycle.

Ultimately, that was my advice to the startup. Be candid. Use this reality check as a dangling carrot when you begin courting prospective clients. Flip convention on end. Hire an HR change management expert or design thinker to support sales; or partner an education and training platform that can help design and curate an upskilling plan.

You can’t talk technology today without a parallel dialog about talent. Few startups do.

Looking to the Future

What does future-fit look like to your organization? Where and how do humans fit in your future-state vision? What are you doing to prepare and develop your human resources?

Kicking off an AI sales pitch by asking about a prospect’s people strategy is a novel and disruptive business development approach. And it might sustain the conversation beyond a 30-minute webcam call.