Developing the Supply Chain Professionals and Leaders AI Can’t Replace
Introduction
We can’t overemphasize the influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the supply chain landscape as a whole. However, we do not agree that it has become the great job replacer as many people fear. Sure it is increasingly impacting reporting, analytics, and other functions. However, a lot of hiring and firing decisions are being made without proper involvement of the functional leaders within an organization. Also, the soft skills necessary to lead, manage, and interpret data have become even more important with the growth and influence of AI.
This is Part 1 of a 2 part article series exploring ways that supply chain leaders and working professionals can enhance their careers and protect their bottom lines by relying on things they already know.
Precision Hiring is Reshaping Supply Chain Talent
Supply chain hiring in today’s environment is targeted, selective, and increasingly tied to specific capabilities. Despite headlines suggesting widespread hiring slowdowns, demand remains healthy in many corners of the market. The difference is that organizations are hiring with far greater precision than they did just a few years ago.
Some sectors are clearly under pressure. Consumer packaged goods (CPG) traditionally has been a larger driver of supply chain hiring and workforce expansion. This industry now faces smaller margins and rising cost pressures from inflation and shifting consumer behavior. Government-related opportunities have also become more constrained as agencies and contractors navigate budget uncertainty. However we do see targeted movement, upskilling, and modernized roles advertised.
Other areas present a more complicated picture. Public investment in domestic manufacturing and ongoing trade disruptions have created demand for operational talent, but not always at the scale many anticipated. While new facilities continue to come online, automation and AI are reshaping workforce requirements, concentrating hiring around frontline leadership and technically intense roles rather than broad management expansion.
The same pattern is emerging across operations leadership. Open positions certainly exist, but they are often tied to leaders willing to work close to the operation, get results while changing the business and manage more technology-enabled environments.
We’re seeing something similar play out in the robotics and automation industry. While demand is high for maintenance technicians (for the robots), the need for individuals building workflows, integrating technology into existing operations and leading organizational adoption is much greater. These roles require more of a comprehensive experiential background in change management. Operational leadership coupled with enough of an understanding of the nuts and bolts like industrial engineering are also key traits to possess in these environments.
Even sectors generating significant investment, such as energy infrastructure and data centers, are creating more targeted talent opportunities than many observers expected. Capital deployment is substantial but workforce demand remains concentrated in relatively narrow areas.
None of this should come as a surprise to those of us working in supply chain. Gartner’s supply chain research has consistently found that organizations are directing investment toward resilience, automation, and risk mitigation rather than overall workforce expansion. On the surface, this makes the supply chain labor market feel fragmented and contradictory. Opportunities remain plentiful for professionals with the right skills, but demand is becoming much more selective. If you don’t have the right skills, it can feel like you are on the outside looking in.
Leadership Development Shifts in the Age of AI
The next generation of supply chain leadership won’t be about who uses AI or who doesn’t. It will lean more towards who retained and developed the soft skills during a time of rapid technological advancement. Those combining technical fluency, operational execution, and human judgment will thrive. Just because routine work is becoming more and more automated doesn’t mean that there is not a need, and will continue to be a need, for workforce expansion in these areas. It just means the work has changed some. Context, domain depth, and decision making under uncertainty in-demand capabilities that can accelerate your career expansion while providing employers with a viable talent pipeline for the future.
The procurement practice fits neatly into the contradictory nature of today’s supply chain labor market. Long considered simply a cost control function, strategic sourcing and procurement has shifted into more of a strategic discipline focusing on supplier relationships, resilience, and long-term value creation. Because of this shift, hiring procurement talent has also become more competitive with third party talent professionals being a valuable cog in the talent wheel.
As organizations continue to use AI sourcing tools, spend analytics platforms, and automated procurement workflows, some of the more traditional entry-level jobs have gone away. This means that the challenge for future procurement leaders will be gaining access to relevant experiences that can help to build and develop strategic capabilities. How are you supposed to become a proficient and highly strategic leader if you can’t access the tactics necessary to build said strategies?
A lot of higher level procurement skills are difficult to automate and remain in high demand in the labor market. One cannot automate cross-functional collaborative skills essential for comprehensive communications and reporting while balancing external and internal relationships. These skills are only developed and honed by doing the work. The world’s volatility and continued disruptions create an increased desire to hire personnel capable of weathering these storms, figuratively and literally. These are the people who can influence suppliers to evolve along with inserting, developing, and qualifying new suppliers in new regions.
If you can balance cost, risk, and long-term business objectives, you are a desirable candidate for every supply chain employer right now.
AI Is Improving Execution. It Is Not Creating Leadership.
Decision engineering at Georgia Tech is contra AI. We overtly teach anti AI applied critical thinking. Bonafide critical thinking is taught in the following ways:
- structured problem solving;
- business case development;
- all aspects of communication including story telling;
- Cross functional collaboration.
Precise communication and collaboration skills are essential to execute the above scenarios. These muscles rarely get flexed if automation, machine learning, and AI take over the entry layer of supply chain work. You need to be able to talk about the data even if you’re not crunching the hard numbers. How are you going to synthesize and analyze up the chain if you can’t discuss data and analytics? When your boss asks you the “why” and the “so what” of the numbers, you better be able to come up with an answer.
At the same time, it’s vital for the employer to carefully design new roles that properly use the outputs of AI models. Moving people from manually modeling and coding to interpretation requires a detailed examination of outputs specific to your given functionality. Otherwise you risk homogenizing and even losing your human talent. There’s no use in creating a carbon copy of the machine. Getting rid of the people means you could have a high level executive who will only be feeding AI agents. If not well architected, this could create a lot of problems.
Functional leaders absolutely need to be involved in AI strategy discussions. They have to learn how to build acuity in this space in order for the company to make the right decisions about the implementation of various technology platforms. These decisions often come with personnel impacts. C-Suite leaders aren’t always attuned to the downstream nuances of how their capital investment could impact those below them. Moreover, if the functional team isn’t involved the leadership don’t have the proper x’s and o’s regarding nuanced deployment of new tools and platforms.
Conclusion
How AI comes into your company is not an information technology (IT) decision. It’s a business decision. AI is not a substitute for your business acumen, leadership knowledge, or instincts. You still need to develop and work on your business process maturity. Every supply chain leader is working to improve their organizational capacity, capability and agility. Who’s working where and for how much is the central question within this entire matrix. But, do not stop consulting yourself, your instincts, or your own processes just because there’s a machine that can do things quickly. Spend time doing the work of centralizing or decentralizing things and figuring out the overall impacts of that. It takes time. Yes, the work is changing but use YOUR brain to understand these changes. And then get your teams to do the same. Enhance reporting and analytics with AI but continue using adult learning approaches focused on soft skills like communication and interpersonal skills. Find ways to enhance cross functional effectiveness. Also, no machine is going to develop relationships with your vendors. But you can develop that talent from the ground up.
Just as professionals are obligated to hone different skills, employers need to adapt and design roles with the proper outputs and learn to exercise organizational process maturity. There’s work in that. We will continue to see disruption in the entry level layers of employment but we also feel like the pipeline of talent will begin adjusting and developing necessary skillsets more rapidly.
In part 2, we will discuss how these synergies can be created and maintained while working to not outsource your thinking.
About The Author
Chris Gaffney is an Edenfield Executive-in-Residence and a Professor of the Practice in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He also serves a dual role as Managing Director of the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute (SCL) and Academic Program Director for Georgia Tech Professional Education (GTPE) . He was most recently VP of Global Strategic Supply Chain at The Coca-Cola Company. During his 25-year tenure with Coca-Cola, Chris held multiple leadership roles including President of Coca-Cola Supply, SVP Product Supply System Strategy, VP of System Transformation, and VP of Logistics for North America. Chris also served as President of the National Product Supply Group; a governing body responsible for 95% of volume produced in North America. Following his retirement from Coca-Cola in 2020, he assumed the role of Principal at ECG and partner at EDGE Supply Chain, providing advice and consulting in the Supply Chain space. Gaffney has extensive experience in Consumer Products Supply Chain, Supply Chain Strategy & Transformation, Footprint Design & Network Optimization, Supply Chain Operating Model and Capability Building and Logistics and Supply Chain Planning.
