Despite substantial investments in AI, business technology insights firm Gartner is predicting that only a few organizations will actually use the advanced technology to automate areas of their supply chain planning by 2030.
Only 5 percent of organizations that implement some form of supply chain automation will make a minimum of 10 percent of their planning decisions autonomously by the end of the current decade.
The prediction, which is based on Gartner surveys and interactions with clients, makes a distinction between AI that can support decision making through insights, for example, and AI that can automate the decision making.
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Buse Aras, director analyst in Gartner’s supply chain practice, underscored how AI readiness does not necessarily come with investing in AI.
“Spending millions on supply chain planning automation can expand technical capabilities, but investment alone does not create AI readiness,” he said.
He noted that leaders must set the necessary technology and talent foundations before scaling AI-enabled planning. Without these, they “risk funding technology that does not improve the planning decisions that matter most.”
It’s an outlook that continues to push an outsized role for human oversight in supply chain operations, as AI is delegated tasks that are considered less consequential.
“We still expect substantial investment in AI-enabled planning, but most organizations initially use AI to support or augment decisions rather than making them autonomous,“ he said. “Full autonomy will remain concentrated in routine, high-frequency and lower-risk decisions because data readiness, system integration, trust and accountability remain as barriers, while complex and strategic decisions will continue to require human oversight.”
It’s a vision for the future that’s not a total departure from the present. In August, a survey from Gartner showed that more than half of supply chain officers are not sure about what their return on investment is from AI, despite the significant investments already poured into it. Gartner’s survey polled 394 supply chain professionals from companies that make at least $250 million a year.
MIT saw a similar result in a landmark study on generative AI last year. Despite funneling $40 billion into enterprise investment, 95 percent of organizations are not yet seeing any returns.
Others, however, see the future differently.
For example, earlier this year software company Kinaxis released a survey on over 2,000 supply chain leaders across nine markets including the U.S. Two-fifths (41 percent) of them expect autonomous supply chains at scale to be their operating model within one to two years—even though only one in eight organizations has been fully embedded with AI governance.
