Joanna Kostecka and Dhaval Desai of Microsoft Cloud detail the company's artificial intelligence experience and its partnership with SAP.

To hear Kostecka tell it, we’re in an “AI arms race.” Demand growth, no longer steady and linear, jumps, sometimes hundreds of percent. What she calls the normal world of predictably accurate forecasts doesn’t exist anymore, and lead times have increased dramatically as well.

Needless to say, all this takes place at the same time that Microsoft’s supply chain – like any supply chain anywhere – has to confront such challenges as the world's economic situation, geopolitical challenges, weather, labor, and on and on. “It’s so much faster than what it has ever been.” 

“In this arms race,” Desai says, “the biggest thing is how fast you can deliver the demand or the capacity that your data center needs worldwide. People who have the capacity are the ones who can run the AI models; they can start experimentation and they can deliver value.”

The company’s journey began by assessing its processes and eliminating waste in them. “Then you leverage AI to automate those processes,” Desai says. “Now, you are not only reducing the cycle time from a process perspective, but with AI, you're also infusing the right degree of intelligence. And you can deliver the value at the right speed that the business expects you to do.”

Given that Microsoft and SAP have partnered for more than three decades, it’s no surprise the two teamed up again, Desai says. He feels SAP is known for the depth of its business processes. Consequently, Microsoft’s team wanted to use the SAP applications to standardize its own processes in order to scale its business.

Monthly or even weekly planning simply won’t work anymore for Microsoft, Kostecka says. “You have to adjust the rhythm of the business to actually fit what your company is experiencing,” she says.