PSC LIVE: The AI Innovation Debate and Reshaping Operations

AI has emerged as a critical tool in global supply chains, as business leaders need to adapt fast to changing environments.

In today's turbulent geopolitical world, supply chains are at great risk of disruption, but AI is helping organisations respond better to growing demands.

Experts took to the stage at Procurement and Supply Chain LIVE: The US Summit, to take part in a debate on AI innovation.

Building resilience

The world today is constantly being redefined, with global instability resulting in regular disruptive events. At the start of this ongoing stretch of turbulence, supply chains found themselves in a constant state of reaction – unable to find their footing or build resilience enough to withstand these hits to stability. 

Now, however, AI has become a core tool for helping global supply chains withstand this pressure. With the integration of AI within procurement and supply chain functions, it is less about reaction and more about predicting and mitigating.

As global demand increases, with supply chains becoming more complex every day, procurement and supply chain leaders have become central to driving this resilience and ensuring stability. Despite this, they are put under immense pressure to do more with less funds – rising inflation, tariff pressures and more have increased global costs significantly.

As a result, AI has entered the market as a means to allow these leaders to do more with less – the tool can take care of the time consuming manual tasks at a fraction of the speed and resources, while allowing the human teams to make the decisions and focus on the customer. This innovative tool is helping leaders cut costs without cutting quality, but it can be applied to so many more functions.

Leaders gathered at Procurement and Supply Chain LIVE: The US Summit, at the AI Innovation Debate, held in association with Zip, to discuss how innovation in AI has impacted their operations and what it could become. 

The sustainability concern

The global adoption of AI as a tool has had both its celebrators and its sceptics. Though it can be used to drive sustainability initiatives and support value chains, the speed at which it has been adopted has created environmental concerns. Data centres are being used at a greater capacity than ever, consuming large amounts of water, energy and coal. 

Though this is a central concern to many, at PSC Live, the experts argue that it does not consume more than manual processes do – rather that this is over a shorter period of time. The resources, the panelists argue, would be used anyway. 

"They're using more coal, but they're also using more wind and more solar for all of these data centres," argues Dr. Alyson Freeman, Director of Data Center Sustainability at Dell Technologies.

"Where we are in trying to make this AI transition is we need every bit of energy available. We need to be looking at how do we do carbon capture as a short-term solution? How do we get to the longer term truly sustainable energy choices? In the long run, I believe there are definitely ways that we will move AI to being compatible with our lives and our planet and sustainability. And AI can actually be part of this solution."

The workforce issue

Another core concern for the implementation of AI is how it is affecting the workforce. The technology seen as double-edged sword, particularly when addressing labour gaps. Many industries at present are facing workforce shortages and skills gaps.

The introduction of AI is filling these gaps and ensuring the supply chain can continue to operate.

However, sceptics are concerned that this is leading to the AI takeover of the workforce – if the technology can operate for longer, without breaks and more efficiently, it will replace human workers, therefore pushing them out of jobs. 

Panellist at the debate addressed this very issue, arguing that it is aiding with each job, rather than taking it over completely.

Luhua Xu, AI Product Marketing Lead at Zip, says: "I think AI will not replace our job entirely anytime soon. When we're seeing agents that we're deploying today, it helps you do your job better and in a more productive way.

"Ideally, you'll still need human oversight at the end, and that just cannot be replaced by AI today. It's helping you to transform your four hours of work to maybe two to three hours. And then you can also spend time doing the more strategic work at the end. So that's what I see in the short term. In the long term, I think that's the scepticism that comes with every new technology and every new product. There will always be questions around, will we lay off people with industrial revolution or with AI?

"It's the same question. But then hopefully as human beings in general, we get to the future that we do less manual work in general and we can spend time on more meaningful things."

The debate continued to discuss how AI can be used alongside a job in order to aid it and make the worker more efficient. Dr Jutta Pils, Global Head, Digital & Agentic Innovation & Sustainability Strategy at DuPont, argued that it is up to the employee to ensure that they adapt to the technology and embrace it.

"So my only advice is AI is not taking your job," she says firmly.

"Even if you're an administrative person, it's not taking your job. AI would contribute to your job, but you have to learn it in your area. If you're administrative assistant, learn the tools to manage more people in your company, learn the tools to have more workflows in your company, make your human knowledge relevant and use AI to emphasise and grow.

"So it doesn't necessarily need to get rid of people, but naturally it's leadership and also your own drive."

Human-in-the-loop

On this level, the panellists also argue that AI could create more jobs, and that it needs to maintain a human-in-the-loop approach.

The use of AI, to be the most effective and most efficient, gets applied to manual and repetitive tasks. This cuts down the time spent on each task to allow for leaders to make decisions faster and with greater accuracy,

By utilising AI in this way, businesses waste less time on the behind-the-scenes work to enable stronger customer-focused interaction, as well as to build confidence in decision-making for leaders.

"How much of [the fear is] similar to the dot com bubble where what you're seeing is AI is coming in and businesses that maybe weren't adding as much value are suffering? In the industrial space, we've got a while. Vontier is critical infrastructure in almost every country we operate in," adds Rasha Hasaneen, Chief Innovation & Growth Officer at Vontier.

"There's not going to be a situation where you don't have a human in the loop when you're talking about the energy infrastructure of a country or the retail infrastructure of a country.

"Our customers were the ones that had to be open during COVID. And so in those situations, we're going to be slower to adopt AI in mission critical operations, faster to adopt AI, to reduce non-value added work.

"We're going to have a pretty good runway where we still have humans in the loop. We still need that expertise, that decision making, that accountability to ensure that the critical infrastructure remains intact. Maybe over time, there will be less of a need for as many people doing a specific job, but it doesn't mean that there aren't additional jobs that would be created."

The debate focused on addressing concerns that people in the industry may have – both for the environment and their job security – but it also addressed that AI is likely to here to stay, and when implemented properly can work closely with a human workforce to ensure efficiency and productivity.