Gallo's artificial intelligence journey is about decision improvement, says Nitin Murali, vice president of supply chain excellence at the venerable winemaker.

Murali prefers to think of  Gallo’s AI journey as a “decision-improvement journey,” by which the winemaker is able to draw on SAP’s ecosystem to make decisions more quickly with more information, while ensuring that it’s receiving the right signals that lead to the best judgment. “It’s about value creation for us,” he says.

Supply chain “orchestration” is touted these days as a means of bringing together disparate and siloed functions within an organization. But Murali believes that “we need to rethink the way we orchestrate — even the need for it.” The most value, he says, “resides at the edges.” Even the most accurate forecasting and demand planning don’t necessarily result in the right inventory. “You are not seeing the transference of information between demand and supply, which is exactly where the value really happens,” he says.

Murali sees the execution of key functions as consisting of a “dyad” between automation and humans, the latter of which still drive much of the required judgment. Gallo, he says, is designing what it calls a “human decision boundary,” defining “areas where you want to ensure accountability, and the architecture is very clear.”

In using AI, he says, it’s vital to ensure that the model is both explainable and auditable. To do that, “we start with the decision and work our way backwards.”

“We’re not boiling the ocean anymore,” Murali says. “We’re going through a very specific set of inputs you need to curate and make available.”

When it comes to defining the success of AI, Murali says he prefers to emphasize value creation over reliance on  key performance indicators, which he views as representations of the past. “We’re more interested in what we need to do in the future, when something like this happens again,” he says.