Zack Knight

Supply Chain Now, ranked by Feedspot as number 1 of their Top 10 Supply Chain Management Podcasts You Must Follow in 2020, announced a new strategic initiative that will bring additional insight to their coverage of the best in all things supply chain. In January 2020, the streaming media company kicked-off Supply Chain Today & Tomorrow, a monthly discussion with Gartner Vice President of Research Mike Griswold. VIEW FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE.

Prospects of supply chain automation have the industry abuzz. It’s even become a major sticking point in the International Longshoremen’s Association contract negotiations with the United States Maritime Alliance. The dockworkers do not want ports to automate processes out of fear they will lose their jobs to machines. Today, there are seemingly endless possibilities for optimization. Terms like generative artificial intelligence and machine learning have become commonplace in discussions about ways to gain efficiencies and reduce costs. Can man and machine work together as businesses leverage automation for optimization? Beyond the Buzz: Understanding the Automation Imperative Machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), is described by Business News Daily as a later-stage development in which machines take in data on their own and then analyze it. Automation, on the other hand, is fixed on repetitive tasks; after a job is performed, an automation system “thinks no further.” The Business News Daily article explained that “automation involves an entire category of technologies that provide activity or work without human involvement,” while AI involves “a machine exhibiting and practicing something similar to what we describe as human thinking – that is, the ability to interact in thousands of ways with the…