Supply chain leaders have spent years trying to improve forecasts, gain better visibility and react faster when conditions change. Artificial intelligence is changing that equation by shifting how information reaches planners, how quickly they can test alternatives, and which tasks still require human attention.

Across companies such as Microsoft, Gallo, Blue Diamond Growers and CloudPaths, a common picture emerges, where AI’s impacts surface in how the technology can compress the time between seeing a problem, understanding the tradeoffs and deciding what to do next.

For Tushar Bala, CTO of CloudPaths, uncertainty itself isn’t the sole problem facing supply chains. The harder question is how quickly a company can react to it, and that distinction is becoming especially important as planning horizons stretch in two directions at once. A business might need to make some operating decisions daily or weekly, while simultaneously looking several years ahead with strategic suppliers. 

The next question involves what planners actually receive from AI. At winemaker Gallo, VP of supply chain excellence Nitin Murali draws a distinction between traditional KPIs and what he calls “signals.”

A KPI generally tells a planner what already happened, while a signal can go further by explaining what happened, why it happened, and how confident the system is in its recommendation.

Faster decision-making depends heavily on what the AI can see. Many companies already possess most of the data they need, but it’s also scattered across different parts of the organization. Bringing more of that work into a common planning model can give a company a single source of information and make scenario analysis substantially faster.

SAP — having worked with Blue Diamond, CloudPath, Microsoft and Gallo — is approaching that shift by connecting AI with the planning and operational systems where those decisions already take place. SAP also provides what it describes as a “clean digital core,” where business processes are standardized, unnecessary customizations are eliminated, and AI is embedded directly into planning workflows.