Agentic AI in the global supply chain

Executive Summary

In the fast-paced world of supply chain management, every second matters. Delays, inefficiencies, and disconnected data can have massive financial and operational consequences. The introduction of agentic AI—intelligent, sometimes autonomous agents that can understand natural language, bridge information gaps, integrate across systems, and even take action—represents a huge opportunity for operational improvements. Unlike generative AI, which is great for creating content, agentic AI can act upon insights, collaborate, make decisions, and initiate actions across different business functions. This allows COOs to have oversight and control over all design-to-operate processes in near-real time, simply by giving the agent a goal to achieve, phrased as a natural language query.