I experienced the start of the Internet and email in late ’90s when I oversaw transportation for Americas for a large OEM. All the express integrators I dealt with had major concerns about email replacing their high volume and lucrative envelop business, both domestically as well as internationally. And so, it did. What they had not expected was the creation of a new market: small parcel express business. This market saw huge growth in the following decades and continues to be more and more lucrative due to the e-commerce business.

The debate over technological achievements destroying jobs is nearly a century old. In all the waves of technical progress we have established that overall, technological unemployment (loss of jobs caused by new technologies) is a myth. I will make my point with a more recent example from our industry.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, a large OEM I worked for had introduced industrial 3D printing. At the time, industrial and consumer 3D printing was in the headlines as a potential new revolution. Logistics service providers were concerned about 3D printing taking over their traditional warehousing and cross-dock business. What they didn’t realize then that they would be the perfect solution provider for 3D printing capabilities in their existing contract logistics sites. Combining traditional contract logistics to store raw materials for 3D printing and combining end distribution with it. 3D consumer, commercial, and industrial printing is still a developing business, but has given a lot of great solutions to the logistics industry already.

Today, Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has reached the headlines and its implementation and impact on the supply chain industry isn’t fully understood. We can choose how AI will define the future of work: we can use it to simply replace workers, or we can use it to expand their skills and capabilities, leading to growth and new jobs¹.

Question isn’t if AI will change the supply chain as we know it, because the change is already underway. Just observe the trends in workforce, cybercrime, geopolitics and tariffs, wars, and natural calamities. What the organizations in supply chain industry need to figure out is the best way to use AI to cope with this change, ease into the transition, and then come out at the top with a resilient and agile supply chain ecosystem.

To make AI work for your organization, you need: data standardization and a single source of truth. AI is only as good as the data we feed into it. If it takes a week to collect data from different interfaces by downloading it from multiple spreadsheets, cleaning it up, and then preparing everything in a single format to feed into an AI engine, the results are dated. You can’t blame AI for it.

What you need is an automated solution where real-time data (time stamped and tamper proof) in a single format is being fed into an AI engine. This way AI constantly iterates on live-data and the results are useful.

The Vinturas Interoperable Network (VIN) solution is a key enabler for the AI models of our customers. After successful implementations with our customers and their AI partners, I am confident of the impact of AI in supply chain planning, manufacturing, logistics, maintenance, and many other applications.

AI will create more jobs than it destroys. Personally, I believe it will create a lot of new business and related employment opportunities. But the success will be based on entrepreneurship and being open to new technologies. Other big determinators for success are the quality of meta-data and a level of (governmental) control, to prevent traditional AI, generative AI, and augmented AI being used for evil purposes.