Watch: Critically Important Supply Chain Technologies

Agentic AI, intelligent vision systems and an augmented connected workforce are among the technologies revolutionizing the supply chain, says Leonard Ammerer, director analyst, supply chain technology strategy, at Gartner.

Ammerer is optimistic about the positive role that agentic AI can play in the supply chain because it can execute faster, if not immediately, on decisions and tasks. In his view, this is important because supply chain organizations have suffered in the past from a gap between decision-making, which is basically the setting of a specific course of action, and the implementation of the decision, which is executing against the operational environment.

“This is a technology gap, which is caused by data undergoing a latency from the source where it is initially taken from to the processing and analysis to the decision-making,” he says. “Agentic AI relies on the tasks and goals to achieve. For example, think about maintaining a specific state of safety stock or placing a purchase order depending on external market conditions. This is why it’s so powerful. We have suffered from this gap for decades in the past, but agentic AI has a high chance of closing it.”

Intelligent vision systems close a different gap, the one between physical reality and the digital environment. That’s done by providing the flexibility of what usually is done by humans doing visual investigation, particularly in warehouses.

Finally, the augmented connected workforce combines the best of the human workforce with the most advanced of digital technologies. Robots are limited in that they don’t have the flexibility and hand-eye coordination of humans, and humans have neither the strength nor stamina of robots, though so-called exoskeletons help somewhat. Additionally, humans can’t “ingest” the amount of information about a certain environment that machines can.