The robots are coming! They are going to replace in our jobs! This is what you hear for the last years when people discuss Artificial Intelligence (AI). This will not be restricted to just one industry but will be spread over every industry and job. If you are planning your career in Supply Chain/Procurement field related to IT, then this information might valuable for you.
Deep neural networks, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Computer and so on- these are some of the core technologies that might sound familiar to you, right? You might ask what they have to do with Procurement, but they do relate to procurement through the application teams such as Virtual Assistants, Cognitive Advisors, Predictive Analytics, etc. Spend classification is a product where ML automatically classifies transactions based on the previous experience and the information input (Tradeshift, 2018). Another example is invoice automation in which we can take scanned/PDF invoices and interpret and classify them according to the info found on the invoice. There is another interesting use-case called contract analytics where entire contract is taken into account and the contract can be analyzed with the help Natural Language Processing. One can search for different clauses and assign risk scores to the contract. Moreover, AI can also be utilized in the Risk Management area where one can analyze extreme large sets of data from internet to see the impact on the business. You can get any news about suppliers (e.g. suppliers’ factory shut down, M&A) or any rumours in the core areas of your business that may impact your supply chain.
As a matter of fact, AI can allow us to do certain activities that we have not been able to do before. AI will lead to the removal of the administrative, low-level and repetitive tasks. That will free up our time and allow us to have more focus on the strategic activities. For example, there are some companies that possess huge supply base and it is extremely hard to manage all of those suppliers. So, if AI can assist us in identifying trends in performances, we can concentrate on actions to reduce those trends. By looking at the previous patterns AI can get recommendations on which suppliers to deal with.
In short, despite of some fear of AI, it is capable of making us smarter at our job and bring additional value to the business.
References:
TradeShift (2018). Artificial Intelligence in Procurement: Featuring Gartner Expert Magnus Berfors and Christian Lanng. Retrieved from: https://tradeshift.com/
Thanks for your blog about how AI spread in every industry! I could totally agree that in the future some roles will be entirely redundant and some of them replace in part because of AI application. I read that much low-income, manual work will still require human workers. It will take more time to roboticides these roles entirely –> automated vehicles will deliver goods to local hubs, but now robot is not enough smart to navigate them. I think AI could have great impact in the “administrative, low-level and repetitive tasks” industry, I believe almost no one will have this kind of job soon.