At the end of every calendar year, various business media outlets publish articles about predictions for the future. Executive leaders across different business segments are asked to provide their point of view on what they are expecting and excited about in the coming new year. Technology tends to dominate the narratives, which comes with lofty, optimistic visions of lights out innovation and rapid progress. It’s usually pretty detached from reality.
Few predictions about technology take place without a heavy dose of Artificial Intelligence (AI) being positioned as the mega IT disruption moment that is rolling across all sectors of the consumer and business world. AI is here, it’s real, and it’s gradually making an impact.
In the consumer dimension of AI, things are moving fast. The fact that a self-driving car can pick you up, take you to the airport where you use a facial scan to pass through security, before sitting down at the gate waiting area and verbally dictating a day’s worth of meeting notes into a CRM system is no longer in the domain of Star Wars, it’s here. Just ask Siri!
Consumer technology is always many years ahead of business IT, and despite AI’s potential, it’s still in the early stages of evolution and maturity when it comes to transforming the business of getting products made, shipped and sold. But things are moving in the right direction.
The potential for AI in logistics has been at the forefront for the past several years. It’s a massive industry that is saddled with enormous complexity and AI’s ability to read, execute, and learn may be the solution that brings the levels of standardization and digitization that is so desperately needed.
The Event: Making AI Count - Real World Answers for Global Logistics
Recently, Raft hosted a webinar in conjunction with the Journal of Commerce to dive into the challenges, opportunities and early results of AI deployments at Scarbrough Global Logistics, one of the industry’s most innovative providers.
The discussion between Adam Hill, CEO at Scarbrough and Nisarg Mehta, CTO at Raft was fascinating, informative, and worth a listen. You can find the recording here.
The audience engagement before and during the webinar also provided several data points related to the topic of AI in Logistics, which were somewhat telling. During the event, live polls were used to measure the opinions across a large audience of attendees from all sectors of the supply chain industry.
Registrations were exceptionally high for a webinar of this type. Typically, B2B technology webinars draw 50 to 150 registrations, with about 35% showing up for the live event. In this case, there were more than 450 registrations. 55% of registrants blocked their calendars, logged in on time, and attended the event virtually. Marketing helps, but numbers like this show there is significant interest and curiosity around AI and what it can really do for logistics.
Poll Results Prove AI is Real, With Investments Ramping
Three live poll questions were conducted during the event. The questions were designed to measure the status of AI in the minds of the attendees and at their respective organizations. The findings were interesting and somewhat telling.
First, the audience was asked to rate AI’s potential for driving digital transformation for Logistics in three very simple ways - is it real, is it too early, or is it all hype? 57% of respondents consider the potential significant, while an additional 40% believe AI is still in the early maturity stage.
That’s 97% of respondents essentially validating there's something real taking place with AI, or it’s about to happen. The fact that less than 3% consider it ‘all hype’ demonstrates that despite a common complaint outside the industry that there’s too much AI hype out there, Logistics people are clearly leaning in.
Question 2 took the potential of AI a step further and asked them a very basic question - Is AI on the corporate IT 2025 priority list at their company? 71% of respondents indicated that it is on their strategic plans, while just 20% said it was not. This may be a reflection of “learn or get left behind syndrome” or companies may have specific initiatives on the plan, but it’s a signal that investments are going to be being made.
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In an effort to understand where investments might be focused, the audience was then asked to select a logistics workflow process that they believed AI would have the most impact on. Five choices were presented as follows:
- AI will handle most of the routine administrative manual tasks and rekeying
- AI will automate and consume data from across supply chain partners
- AI will improve current system investments (TMS, ERP, etc.)
- AI will become the next generation user interface
- AI will start making decisions and executing
In a somewhat surprising development, four of the five options were chosen almost exactly equally, with 23-27% for each. However, not a single respondent selected the language user interface dimension of AI, a capability that has become so prevalent in the consumer world.
To me, this indicates the desire for basic “block and tackling” of automating and standardizing information flows, which is a burning platform priority when compared to replacing keyboards and screens with voice. It will be interesting to see how this evolves as consumer tech continues to become more voice controlled and younger generation workers move into high level roles.
There’s no question that AI is moving from the experimental, early innovator phase to a mainstream adoption mode. That’s likely why we saw so much interest in the webinar, which was also echoed in the poll data.
This is far from a scientific research study, but in my opinion the feedback from a large number of executives and managers that spend their days in the trenches doing the work, this kind of insight is compelling. It’s certainly more relevant than the perspectives of a handful of execs who ask their marketing teams to draft a bunch of fluffy concepts for the annual predictions feature story in the trade publications.