When Your App Argues Back: AI in the Supply Chain

Dr Andrew Armstrong
3 min readJun 22, 2020

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Ubiquitous and often pervasive — AI usage is growing

AI won’t be taking over the world’s networks and exterminating humanity via clouds of drone swarms any time soon. But in a matter of a few years, AI will further be a part of our lives and wired into our homes, workplaces, shopping centres, doctor’s office, and more.

Naturally, the inevitable increased use of autonomous decision making has implications for the supply chain. AI will usher in a consumer behaviour revolution. Transportation systems are already preparing for AI’s ubiquitous penetration into traffic operations, congestion planning, road planning, and self-driving vehicles. Retail services are close behind with a huge future hunger for AI as they seek to enhance supply chain operations from factory floor to delivery door, and of course, let us not forget the hot topic of Pandemic viral exposure tracing.

AI Makes Better Decisions Faster

In the real world, AI turned loose on big data with a specific mission sits just over the horizon, something that today remains incubating in beta testing. One of the expectations is that AI will be able to see problems and react to them in real time. Expect the quality of the AI’s decisions to be under the microscope as the technology rolls out across mainstream business operations.

An increasing amount of data isn’t the only trend contributing to the development of AI. In fact, there is a wide range of other important factors driving the trend, including computer power and speed, algorithmic advancements, and increasing AI system access to big data.

At Cadonix, we’ve been applying AI to our costCompare suite of automated pricing tools. Among saving time, labour, and research costs, costCompare has features that help with supplier negotiations. With AI searching, correlating and indexing our data pool, our tool spots places where suppliers are quoting a non-optimal price to their customers.

Other places where AI will alter the supply chain is in Algorithmic advancements. Smart algorithms can predict future supply and demand and adjust pricing so businesses can scale their pricing quickly. The AI performs the analysis in real time and with faster and more meaningful price alterations than realistic resources would permit for human teams. The end result is that companies will be able to set pricing formulas that react to market conditions and require minimal management from humans.

AI will make possible a vision of the future where much of our purchasing is automated, transacted over the Internet, and delivered to our homes, offices, and schools. We will be turning some decision making over to AI companions. Everything from the mundane, like whether to substitute large eggs if extra-large is unavailable, to the critical, like raising prices to account for fuel increases while still maintaining a competitive edge. If the past decade of Internet development is any indication, we’ll have a significant period of trial and error, and amusing / alarming unintended consequences.

To find out more on how we at Cadonix are applying our cloud technologies to optimise businesses around the globe, head over to www.cadonix.com and see how we can help your organisation. For specification information on costCompare and datasheets please click the following link: costCompare at Cadonix.

Originally published at https://www.cadonix.com on June 22, 2020.

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Dr Andrew Armstrong
Dr Andrew Armstrong

Written by Dr Andrew Armstrong

Andrew has been developing leading cloud brands through computer research, cloud technologies and advanced software architecture development for several decades

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