AI in the Supply Chain: Fact and Fiction

Tom Moore and Keith Moore, CEOs of, respectively, ProvisionAi and Autoscheduler.AI, talk about how artificial intelligence is helping to solve problems in supply chains and the warehouse — and where it's more a matter of hype than reality.

The big pain point in supply chain today is the “gap between planning organizations and the folks who actually make those plans work,” Tom Moore says. Planning often functions within its own silo, he adds, robbing it of the ability to incorporate all the data needed to understand the current status of warehouse operations — especially when the pipeline is filling up with too much product. “The people who caused the pain are not even knowing it’s happening,” he says.

Convergence between planning and execution, therefore, is essential, but it’s especially tough to achieve in the warehouse. In the post-COVID era, operations are more complex than ever, Keith Moore says.  What’s needed are “orchestrators” who see the big picture and can figure out the correct levels of staffing and inventory at any given moment. “It’s a massive challenge,” he says. “Sites are constantly running behind.”

With all of the recent hype about generative artificial intelligence, one might think that it’s the solution. Not so, says Tom Moore. “GenAI has a great application for me to help write a letter, but it’s not useful in supply chain as we’ve seen it so far,” he says. Keith Moore says the technology was designed to generate images and text in a broad-based manner, and therefore isn’t a good fit in niche supply chain applications. But it can take massive amounts of unstructured data and distill it into something that’s “simple, relatable and understandable,” so that humans can make key decisions.

More traditional AI, on the other hand, provides value in its ability to perform reinforcement learning and predictive analytics, Tom Moore says.

Yet another priority for transportation and warehousing today is the problem of waste, especially when it comes to too many under-loaded trucks. Large carriers are running around 15% deadhead miles, Tom Moore says.

This video is sponsored by ProvisionAi.

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