From Gartner: Rethinking Agentic AI and Supply Chain Planning

Making better decisions in supply chain planning.

Well, joining us today to speak about that, Jeff Metersky, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at GAINSystems.

Jeff, it’s great to see you again. Welcome.

Thanks for having me, Russell. Great to be here.

Jeff, I was thinking of some of the notes that we were taking in our previous conversation just before the interview began.

It’s like, what would you say is the most overrated and underrated things in supply chain right now?

So I think the most overrated thing is this notion of we’re going to go to this autonomous supply chain that’s going to be driven by agentic AI.

I don’t think that that’s the right destination for everything to think that that’s where we want to land at the end of the day.

I think that there are decisions that we make in supply chain that can be automated, but some of them will always require human intervention and advice. And so thinking about that as our destination, like AI is a tool, and it’s one tool in our tool bag, but it’s not the only tool.

Mm.

When I think about the underrated, it comes back to decision-making as well.

I think we’ve not spent enough time really thinking through the importance of the discipline of how we make decisions.

I think we race to improve KPIs. I think we think about how to implement systems that are kind of independent in functional areas, but we don’t think about how these decisions are actually made, who they’re made by, and the needles that we’re actually trying to move at the end of the day. And so spending more focused time on the decision-making process is actually as important as the technology that we’re trying to implement to make better decisions.

You’ve introduced a note of reality, I would think- …

into the conversation there.

But most needed right now. Most needed.

Very good. Why do you think that so many companies are still struggling to make their decisions faster or better?

Why is that still such a hurdle for companies?

Yeah, I think it’s tied to the first question in a lot of ways.

So we’ve not taken a step back and thought about how we’re making decisions, and we’re racing to technology.

We’re thinking that technology’s going to be the end-all solution.

And many times, the technology that still exists is for a world that doesn’t exist anymore.

Mm.

So we’ve built a lot of our logic, especially in the planning domains.

We spent it in situations where the world was static, right?

There wasn’t high levels of variability, there was high levels of reliability, and we’ve got this static planning logic that’s put in place.

And so we haven’t thought about how we actually need to be more adaptive and more responsive in the way that we’re actually doing our decision-making processes.

Okay, I’m a supply chain manager. I want to have a more efficient, more resilient organization. I’m coming to you for some advice.

What are you going to tell me? What do I need to do?

Yeah, I think part of it is taking a step back. We think about, or I’ve thought about throughout my career, resiliency on two sides. You can think about the physical supply chain resiliency, and a lot of times there’s this reactive mode of saying, what do I need to do to actually put in redundancy?

What do I need to do to add in extra inventory or have secondary or tertiary suppliers inside of my supply chain?

And those are all really valid ways to look at it, but sometimes resiliency is actually in the fragility of how I make decisions under stress.

And so when I think about that decision-making process, right, if I want to be more resilient, I can’t know all the future things that are going to happen to me.

And it’s not just about putting that physical capability in place, but it’s the organizational decision-making capability that helps me understand how do I actually make decisions when I’m under stress, right, so that I am not fragile. And I think that has not been given enough attention, right, when we think about supply chains and the decisions that we’re making inside of them.

Again, bringing a great deal of reality into the discussion.

Try to be pragmatic.

Try to be pragmatic, indeed. I know you are busy here at this conference, but you’re meeting with us, you’re giving us valuable information about improving supply chain planning, et cetera. But I want to turn now to GAINSystems itself. And if you would, give any viewer that may not be entirely familiar with the company a look into GAINSystems.

What’s the focus of it? What’s it all about?

Yeah, the focus of GAINSystems is really to improve decision-making.

We don’t think about ourselves as a traditional supply chain planning or supply chain design vendor. We focus on the decisions that actually move the needle, making one decision at a time.

We’re not big into transformation. We’re big into incrementalism.

So figure out that decision that makes the biggest impact to you, improve that decision, and then move on to the next one.

And fundamental tying back to that first question is the notion that not everything in the supply chain from a decision-making perspective can be automated. So we think about something that we’ve called RAPID, which is the Risk Autonomous Principle of Intelligent Deployment of Agentic Technology.

Think about it from the perspective of reversibility.

So decisions that are actually highly reversible.

I’ve got a high performing fast volume SKU, right? And I want to replenish that stock, right?

If I get that decision wrong, it’s probably not a big deal because I get a crack at that again very frequently. And so I can automate that.

If I’m on the other end of the spectrum of things that GAINSystems does in the supply chain design world, and I’m trying to decide where do I build my next manufacturing location, I’m not going to automate that process.

So I might use AI technologies to inform, right, but I’m using the human to actually make the final decision.

Where in that first one, I can automate it.

And so we try to find that balancing act of where do you actually deploy agentic technology across the spectrum of decision-making.

You may very well have saved some viewers some money because- …

valuable information.

Well, thank you.

Jeff, thank you for finding the time to speak with us. Thank you very much.

It’s been my pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity.

Jeff Metersky, GAINSystems, speaking with us today about making better decision-making in supply chain, perhaps in your supply chain.

Thanks for watching.