James L. Heskett

Special Guest Blog Post written by Deborah Dull   Imagine it’s launch season in your supply chain, and a team of AI agents is hard at work: coordinating shipments with suppliers, allocating inventory, and handling a missed delivery. It’s hard to go a day without hearing about the latest AI headlines: new LLMs, new applications, new use cases. These discussions are part of my every day. Business leaders and IT teams are eager to explore – and they have a lot of questions… and apprehension. In these discussions, we have found one framework that lands consistently: consider AI agents like new hires, not new software.   Step 1: Hire Like You Mean It Just like hiring humans, this step is about defining what you need. The first decision is the purpose of the role: what problems are you trying to solve? Where are your people overwhelmed? Where is your business growing in coming months? From here, the next decision is to build the business case just like you would for a new headcount. For example, consider the ROI of having a digital employee who can process supplier performance data 24/7. Now, decide on the type of agent that will join…

Stay up to date on all the latest conversations, interviews, and episodes we released this week here at Supply Chain Now! We started this week off with an episode of Supply Chain Now as Scott Luton chats with Lora Cecere and Dr. Madhav Durbha, Vice President of Supply Chain Strategy for Coupa Software. In Monday’s episode of This Week In Business History, Scott Luton talks about the history and development of video games- from the origins of Atari to the companies that are currently dominating the market. On Tuesday, we republished a classic TEKTOK episode with host Karin Bursa. In this episode, Karin shares six strategies for greater supply chain resilience. On Wednesday’s Supply Chain Now episode, Scott had a great conversation with culture expert, author, and speaker Ray Attiyah with Run Improve Grow. Scott and Ray talk about the key points in his new book, Fearless Front Line: The Key to Liberating Leaders to Improve & Grow Their Business. On Thursday, we released another episode of Supply Chain Now with host Scott Luton and special co-host Allison Giddens. Scott and Allison welcome Chad Molen with NIMBL, and Dan Reeve with Esker to the show. On Friday, we released the…