Having reported on the supply chain world for some 25 years, I’ve seen technologies come and go. Many were once touted as the best thing since sliced bread but either failed to live up to the hype or else had to simmer a few years before they caught on.
Remember the hoopla surrounding dot-com retail? In the late 1990s, we were told that stores as we knew them would eventually go away, to be totally replaced by online shopping. The ease and convenience of e-commerce made that a reasonable expectation. But in March 2000, the bubble burst, and a host of online retailers closed their virtual doors forever. Of course, online shopping is still very much with us, and its share of total retail sales is growing by the year. Maybe we’ll get to that retail seventh heaven someday, but it’s taking much longer than originally predicted.
Then there’s RFID (radio-frequency identification). These small electronic tags were going to replace barcodes largely because of the vast amount of data they can hold and their capacity to update information.
In 2003, Walmart famously demanded that its top 100 suppliers affix RFID tags to all pallets and cases shipped to its DCs. We figured that if Walmart had gone all in on RFID, the rest of the industry would automatically follow. Well, not so fast. It’s true that after years of stutter-step progress, Walmart today is more heavily invested in RFID than ever. But in the rest of the world, the humble barcode is still king.
A more recently hyped technology is blockchain. It was actually conceived back in 1982 but remained just a concept until 2008, when a person (or persons) using the name “Satoshi Nakamoto” created an actual blockchain to serve as the public distributed ledger for cryptocurrency transactions. Blockchain was expected to revolutionize the way supply chain partners do business. But it, too, has been a bit slow to take off, and it’s still unclear how the blockchain story will play out.
That brings us to the latest potentially game-changing technology: artificial intelligence (AI). In some ways, AI is really just data analytics on steroids. Supply chains have relied on data analytics for decades—the difference now is the promise of greater accuracy and better simulations. Will it ultimately change everything we do in supply chain management? Maybe. But it may take a while. A November report from workplace tools developer Slack showed that AI adoption rates among U.S. workers had slowed in the last quarter, while a recent analysis of open supply chain jobs by software integration specialist Cleo found that only 2% of open jobs required AI skills.
So is AI just another fad or a truly transformative technology? It appears we’ll need a few good use cases before we can make that call.
