Blue Yonder Plans to Bring AI-Powered Agents to Various Supply Chain Roles
Blue Yonder is taking another big swing in the artificial intelligence realm.
The company, which offers end-to-end supply chain technology solutions, announced at its annual conference, Blue Yonder Icon, that it will take its AI capabilities one step further this year.
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According to Duncan Angove, the company’s CEO, it will soon be offering generative AI-powered agents to its customers, which can enhance work needed for a variety of roles throughout the supply chain—from planners to warehouse managers and more.
“The difference [here] is, it’s not the [technology] being updated—it’s the human, it’s the user, and it’s like a cognitive upgrade for humanity,” he said. “We will profoundly change the way work is done. I think hidden in [companies’] data, there’s a new warehouse operator, a new planner, a new logistics coordinator.”
Angove and Wade Gerten, Blue Yonder’s senior vice president of generative AI, said that though the process of training agents could take years, the company plans to start small and address the first few major use cases so that it has the ability to roll out the capabilities within the year.
For instance, an agent built to aid a planner may notify that planner of shipping disruptions caused by an incoming storm or weather event. It will, simultaneously, recommend a course of action for the planner to carry out.
In that scenario, if the planner had scheduled domestic shipments to be fully sent by air cargo, but the storm rendered planes unable to fly to certain areas, the system might recommend a combination of air shipment and on-land shipment. The human planner can choose to accept the recommendation, or to override it in favor of another option.
Andrea Morgan-Vandome, chief innovation officer of Blue Yonder, said the agents’ ability to show operators the difference between options could help them understand more about the tool and its decisioning.
“This really gets around some of the concerns in terms of black box—that AI just gives you an answer—because it really will help the players or managers learn as to why [a specific] decision was made,” she said.
Angove said the company believes the new capabilities have the potential to alter supply chain positions in a major way, “digitally promoting” individual contributors to “be managers of fleets of robots, fleets of digital agents.”
Gerten said that while AI-based agents may in time make some roles obsolete, he does not expect AI will eliminate roles left and right. Some jobs, like call center workers, could be affected by the technology as it continues to grow, but he said employees in other positions will benefit, with AI automating manual tasks and freeing employees up to think more strategically and creatively.
The company plans to gather its customers’ thoughts, concerns and preferences around use cases for the agents over the course of the next few months. Once it has adjusted the systems accordingly, customers will be able to leverage the technology later this year.
While that development is ongoing, though, many customers continue to use Blue Yonder’s other AI-enabled tools, which help companies with a variety of tasks, from warehouse management and transportation management, to forecasting and other logistical considerations.
REI, a client of Blue Yonder’s, uses the supply chain company’s systems to help it optimize customer experiences around fulfillment, pickup and delivery. But because of the success REI has seen so far with its Blue Yonder implementations, it can consider where customer demand may ultimately head next: sustainable shipping.
Data from e-commerce firm ESW showed earlier this year that three in 10 consumers consider sustainable shipping when they shop online, and logistics intelligence company Sifted found that 82 percent of consumers would accept an extra day of waiting for a package if it meant the shipping methods were more eco-friendly.
The way Amit Kulkarni, divisional vice president of supply chain, merchandising and co-op brands technology at REI sees it, Blue Yonder could soon help enable more sustainable shipping options for the retailer.
“Sustainable shipping is definitely a consideration, so that’s [an] area we are looking at,” he said during a session at the conference.
That kind of optimization can often be done by using data to place inventory closer to consumers who are more likely to order it, as well as by using transportation management to figure out the most sustainable—yet cost-effective—way to ship an order to the end consumer. REI may also be looking to increase the sustainability of shipments to its warehouses, before consumers come into the equation.
Tractor Supply Company, another customer of the supply chain software company, has been lauded in recent years for its willingness to test and leverage AI in its business practices. It uses a variety of third-party providers, Blue Yonder included, to enable its digital prowess.
Vijay Alagarasan, TSC’s vice president of engineering, said one of the company’s next technical priorities will be using technology to amp up the consumer experience in new stores, where the company may begin attracting new customers.
According to Alagarasan, 77 percent of TSC’s current shoppers are loyal, repeat customers. The company has plans to open 80 new stores in 2024 and 90 new stores in 2025, which presents it with an opportunity to garner even more loyal customers.
Already, TSC uses computer vision technology in some of its stores to help alert employees when consumer dwell times are high, or when checkout lines become longer than usual. It also leverages generative AI with its “Hey, Gura” chatbot, which helps employees answer consumer questions in stores. Alagarasan said the company will continue testing and learning from small-scale technology implementations, then determine whether to scale them up.
“It’s all going back to the outcome—what is the KPI and what is the outcome that we are driving towards? It’s not just the top line—even if it’s a customer experience, or improving the productivity of store associates, or reducing the operational cost, or improving the experience of a DC person, all those aspects, we leverage [new] technology [for],” Alagarasan told Sourcing Journal.
Blue Yonder has helped with many of the implementations TSC has been interested in, but Alagarasan said he would advise any company getting a start with emerging technologies—particularly microservices or verticalized AI solutiosn—to start small and grow larger.
“They have to start with the foundational capabilities to build [technology like this] and not really worry about too many features in it, rather focus on getting one feature in a composable fashion,” he said. “It all goes back to how [quickly] you can iterate on that and add more and more features,” he said. “I think that is where [technology] actually drives more value. That’s where the speed comes in. And then the quality comes in.”
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