Watch: What’s the Best Use of AI Agents in Supply Chain Planning?

Two executives from OMP, senior AI adoption manager Jean-William Cousin and head of product marketing Lachelle Buchanan, discuss the impact of agentic AI on supply chain planning.

The increasing volatility of global supply chains has become “the new baseline,” says Buchanan. That’s causing leaders to demand quick responses to changing conditions, and devise more scenarios that can lead to the right decision. “You can’t wait for the next month’s S&OP cycle to wrap up,” she adds.

The market is converging around two essential capabilities, Buchanan says: speed and decision quality. Previously, supply chain planners might have been able to go either “fast or deep.” Artificial intelligence agents are now making it possible to do both, at scale.

So what does “good” look like in the application of AI agents to supply chain planning today? “In a word, adoption,” says Cousin. “The journey is almost as important as the destination." Organizations must proceed through four levels: gaining the trust of users, relying on autonomous agents to make recommendations, having those agents take actions, and allowing them to perform and summarize a whole series of tasks defined by planners.

The process of delegating to AI agents can start with something as basic as identifying any inconsistencies in the master data. Then agents, having reviewed multiple scenarios, can proceed to build the desired model. “It’s not being reactive,” Cousins says. “It’s designed to think about possible scenarios and be much more efficient when they actually happen."

Three years from now, Buchanan, says, the job of planners “is going to look really, really different.” Humans will move from spending time on tasks such as data cleaning to steering decisions — “the calls that really matter.”