Artificial Intelligence – Opportunities and Challenges for Operations and Supply chain

There are many reasons why we use artificial intelligence in our modern industrial environments. When it comes to operations and supply chain, we can use artificial intelligence for many applications such as recognizing patterns and predicting the future demand. This means the companies that use artificial intelligence will have a higher advantage in their purchasing and procurement process. Also it means a huge saving for manufacturing companies when they purchase raw material and produce exactly as much as the market demands and whenever the market demands. this is then translated to lower purchase volumes, smaller inventory, lower maintenance cost, smaller physical location, higher bargaining power, and much more. AI can also be used to automate the works which are considered repetitive and sometimes event dangerous. Using machines for some manual labor works means less workplace incidents and higher safety. The fact that machines can perform precise image processing, and fast calculations , results in performing tasks which would be difficult or impossible or at least very costly for humans to do.

However, using artificial intelligence will not be without challenges. examples of these challenges would be ethical challenges in the workplace and higher unemployment rate in specific labor market sectors. Imagine what happens if all cashiers, bank tellers, truck drivers, and pathologists loose their jobs tomorrow. Well it will probably happen in ten to fifteen years. Overcoming these challenges needs collective effort and my take time; but we will gradually shift to professions which are more meaningful, need more creativity, and are not dangerous, dull, or boring.