ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a broad overview of the key Artificial Intelligent (AI) capabilities that can be leveraged in Supply Chain Management (SCM) and then narrow to a more granular review of the different applications of AI in SCM. It deals with an overview of the principle challenges of SCM, and then move to a discussion of the four key things AI systems can do to create value in SCM: Understand, Automate, Predict, and Optimize. The chapter looks at where AI is impacting the activities of the key supply chain roles and what kinds of tools are available to facilitate these activities. The classic example is object recognition in computer vision, in which it is now routinely possible for computers to recognize things like cats, dogs, motorcycles, and trees in natural images. Data scientists refer to the “understand” activity of AI systems as “inference.”.
