AI IN SUPPLY CHAIN
No one steps back , thinks big and acts with urgency . The dirty secret of enterprise software is that there ’ s no ‘ R ’ in R & D ; no-one does any research – they just do development . And , most of the time , that development is based on an RFP or a win -loss and it ’ s incremental . We ’ ve invested at scale in the ‘ R ’ in R & D and that doesn ’ t just mean dollars ; it ’ s how people work , the extent to which they are willing to take risks .
Related to that is the ‘ be curious ’ superpower . Be curious about your customer ’ s business and how they work ; be curious about new technology ; be curious about different ways of doing things . And with this comes an optimism about the role technology can play in benefitting businesses and the planet .
Overall , our superpowers describe who we are , how we behave , what our DNA is and , ultimately , they become part of our brand . Our brand is not what we say it is ; it ’ s what our customers say it is and it ’ s exhibited by these behaviours and how we engage with them .
Q . WHAT TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN SPACE ARE YOU MOST EXCITED ABOUT ?
» It ’ s a remarkable time with the emergence of all these technologies . Having said that , I get frustrated sometimes because , suddenly , everyone ’ s an AI company and they ’ ve added dot-AI to their domain names . Quite frankly , it ’ s farcical . Most of these companies have no idea what they ’ re doing , particularly in the supply chain space – the level of hallucination is really bad .
500 +
Number of patents filed by Blue Yonder in its history
But if you look at AI in general , it really came out of the supply chain space . At first , it wasn ’ t really AI – it was integer programming , linear programming , solvers and optimisation , all the way back to the beer run and the travelling salesman . Linear programming came out of the Second World War and was a function of the complexity we had to manage for the logistics of war . It was originally called operations research ; you ’ d go and get an OR degree and you ’ d go and join a supply chain company .
We ’ ve had over 500 patents granted and pending in the history of Blue Yonder and the vast majority are in the supply chain space : how do you optimise the routes that lorries take ? How do you optimise inventory so you don ’ t have food spoilage ? Every day , we do 20 billion machine learning predictions in the cloud . And , by the way , when you look at the trading result of a large supermarket , that ’ s what we ’ re doing . We ’ re using AI to optimise demand and fulfilment at the shelf to drive results and we ’ ve been doing it for at least a decade . You ’ d be surprised , because it ’ s not like 50 % of
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