Jeff Metersky, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at GAINS, cuts through the hyperbole and talks realistically about the benefits of agentic AI and improved supply chain planning.

Agentic artificial intelligence may be top of mind for many in supply chain these days, but the notion that the technology is going to drive an autonomous supply chain is overrated, Metersky says.

“I don't think that that's the right destination for everything,” he says. “I don’t think that that's where we want to land at the end of the day.” Certainly, there are decisions that can be automated, but others will always require human intervention and advice.  “AI is a tool in our tool bag, but it's not the only tool.”

At the same time, Metersky says, supply chain leaders haven’t spent enough time thinking through how decisions are made. “I think we race to improve KPIs, we think about how to implement systems that are kind of independent, but we don't think about how these decisions are actually made, who they're made by, and the needles that we're actually trying to move at the end of the day.” In his view, spending more focused time on the decision-making process is actually as important as the technology one is trying to implement to make better decisions.

While Metersky urges caution and restraint on agentic AI, he feels that often the technology used today was designed for a world that no longer exists. “We've built a lot of our logic, especially in the planning domains, in situations where the world was static. There weren't high levels of variability, there were high levels of reliability, and we've got this static planning logic that's put in place. And so we haven't thought about how we actually need to be more adaptive and more responsive in the way that we're actually doing our decision-making processes today.”