It’s Been Time to Add Generative AI to Your Supply Chain

Why do you need Generative AI in your supply chain? Your voice assistant probably can’t tell you, but we can.

When mobile voice assistants launched, everyone marveled at how you could just ask a question out loud and get a response from your phone or other electronic devices. How cool was that! No logging in, no typing your question in a way the search engine wanted. Just “hey Siri” and you were sent off in the right direction even if it was just on your phone.  That was 2011 and things have changed.

Voice assistants are here, with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant joining Siri and helping with day-to-day tasks, especially around the home. Turn on the lights! Open the garage door! This is great! They’ve come a long way and have helped us automate many things to make our lives easier.

Then came the introduction of ChatGPT and other generative AI products; they took things to a whole new level. They don’t just turn on lights or provide links, they figure out what you’re asking and provide a narrative to answer your questions. Want to know about your favorite baseball team? I asked Siri “Tell me about the New York Mets,” and Siri was nice enough to tell me that they were pummeled that day. (Yes, Siri actually used the word “pummeled” which, while accurate, is kind of a bummer for a fan to hear) When I asked ChatGPT the same question, it gave me a nice narrative about the history of the Mets, which stadiums they’ve played at over the years, team color, team mascot name (Mr. Met if you’re wondering), their two World Series wins, and other useful information. While it doesn’t have today’s score since it only has info through September 2021, I didn’t ask for the current score, I only asked about the Mets so that’s probably what I was looking for.

Wouldn’t it be great if generative AI were available in your supply chain planning system as well? Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have been part of supply chain planning for a long time and are part of the algorithms behind the best of breed forecasting and optimization applications, but there’s so much more that can be done with generative AI.

Instead of searching through the user interface, writing SQL, or wrangling data in Excel you could just ask a question and get the information needed. When your senior management asks, “What is the forecast for my top products?”, you can ask your supply chain software the same question and there it is. Your marketing department wants to know how their promotions are affecting the demand forecast for the company’s top product family, so you ask, “What is the promotion lift for the top product family?”

Boom – there’s the promotional lift for the top family without even having to specify which family it is. Want that as a chart? Just ask!

But why stop there? If your supply chain software can use large language models (part of the technology behind ChatGPT) to understand and respond to natural language questions from you, it can also answer them for everyone else as well. Your senior management can directly ask the question, and instead of the typical back and forth to answer their underlying question they can refine the questions themselves directly in the supply chain software. Provide marketing access and they can ask their questions as well. 

The potential of generative AI is nothing short of transformative, and integrating this technology into your supply chain planning system unlocks a new realm of possibilities.  In the webinar “How ChatGPT Changes All Rules of Supply Chain Planning,” 1,425 registered attendees understood this as well with 79% of respondents saying ChatGPT would have a high or very high impact on supply chain planning.

Imagine being able to access and harness the wealth of data at your fingertips with nothing more than a natural language question. This is a fundamental shift from the traditional, sometimes cumbersome, methods of data retrieval and analysis. But the true power lies in its capacity to democratize data access.  More people can directly engage with the system, refining their questions and extracting insights, driving more informed decisions across your entire organization. Generative AI not only unlocks the latent value in your data but also positions your supply chain system as a dynamic source of answers rather than just raw data, making it an invaluable asset for your business.

“Generative AI not only unlocks the latent value in your data but also positions your supply chain system as a dynamic source of answers rather than just raw data, making it an invaluable asset for your business,” “It will revolutionize the way you navigate the complexities of the modern supply chain landscape and the data that drives it” – Steve Ungar

There is a tremendous value in the data that you maintain, and generative AI can be used to unlock it and provide across within the supply chain function as well as across your entire organization. The more your supply chain planning system can provide ANSWERS to QUESTIONS instead of just proving DATA, the more valuable it becomes.

There are several places to get more information on this topic. Have you seen our AI-first forecasting eBook? You can also get in touch with us, to learn more about Logility’s journey to offering AI-embedded solutions.