AI has evolved from its traditional roots in the last couple years, and its use cases are drastically expanding. With the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, generative AI has changed what productivity means for nearly every industry. As the next AI evolution occurs with wide adoption of agentic AI, we can expect even more explosive change in other areas of the industry — especially the workforce.

Not only is AI optimizing operations; it’s reshaping workforce development in real time. In the past, a junior analyst would have been responsible for manually trouble-shooting failed transactions, writing custom scripts to clean up data or transform file formats, or responding to basic support tickets with solutions. 

Now, AI tools can tackle these tasks, almost instantly. In fact, agentic AI can also take things a step further, acting as an autonomous assistant that can proactively identify  issues before they become problems and taking preemptive action to fix them. Agentic AI will handle these tasks while keeping everyone in the loop throughout the process.

This trend begs the question: What does all this mean for the human assistants and other entry-level roles that previously handled these types of tasks? While AI is helping supply chain professionals focus on work that matters, it’s also minimizing the supportive roles that previously took on these tasks. 

The erosion of an entry-level talent layer is also a strategic risk to long-term resilience for the supply chain industry. These early and junior roles have historically provided critical hands-on experience for employees looking to build careers in supply chain. Without them, the industry loses its most reliable mechanism for developing future leaders. 

According to the World Economic Forum, AI is expected to create a net gain of 78 million jobs by 2035. However, it will in the course of doing so likely displace 9 million, as 40% of employers also anticipate reducing their workforce due to AI. 

Even with AI, organizations throughout the supply chain will need operations managers, integration architects and more. Yet without the invaluable hands-on experience traditionally gained early on, the next generation may not be equipped to fill those roles when the time comes. 

AI is not the big bad wolf, but failing to plan for its long-term impacts can lead to “blowing the house down.” Supply chain leaders must act now to rebuild the career pathways that AI is quietly minimizing, if not entirely eliminating. This starts with a workforce and training restructuring to change how early-career roles learn and gain experience and skills needed for a rewarding future in the industry. This includes:

Structured apprenticeships. In civil engineering, professionals don’t gain experience by building buggy bridges that may collapse. They learn through structured apprenticeships that provide critical hands-on experience with minimal risk. Supply chain education will need to adopt the same model, with AI acting as a mentor that guides students through realistic scenarios before they enter the workforce.

Invest in domain fluency. There’s a noticeable difference between someone who just knows how to use a tool and someone who understands how the supply chain actually behaves. That intuition comes from exposure, not training manuals. A recent Supply Chain Jobs Report unveiled a disconnect between skills posted in job descriptions and the understanding of technology needed to do a job well. For example, only half (54%) of positions required some form of software knowledge, with AI mentioned in only 2% of job descriptions. This gap shows the need to go beyond surface-level skills.

Create feedback loops. As agentic AI starts to move toward autonomous actions, humans still need to have oversight. They must be able to look at an action and ask why the agent took that action, whether it was the right move, and what outcome it will have. This is where junior team members can shadow the AI “instructor” and learn. Embedding junior staff into those review loops can help develop judgment, even if the employees don’t perform the task themselves.

The supply chains of the future will run on AI, but they will be led by people. And those people will need to understand not just how the system works, but why it works the way it does. The ability to reason, troubleshoot and lead in uncertainty will never be fully automated. 

Let’s not wait until those skills are gone to realize what we’ve lost. Let’s invest now while we still have the chance to shape the future workforce that supply chains truly need.

John Thielens is CTO at Cleo.