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Deborah Dull

Deborah Dull is the founder of the Circular Supply Chain Network and Managing Partner of Trillium Digital Services. She authored “Circular Supply Chains: 17 Common Questions” and “Sustainable Supply Chains: Unlearning for a Better Tomorrow,” with a third book on circular supply chains forthcoming in June. With experience at Zero100, GE Digital, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Genpact, and Microsoft, Deborah specializes in AI-driven supply chain innovation, self-driving supply chains, advanced analytics, and responsible business practices. She is a sought-after speaker and has been published in numerous industry publications. Deborah holds a BA in Supply Chain & Operations Management from Western Washington University and an MSc from the University of Liverpool, where her thesis focused on digital supply chain. She is currently pursuing her DBA from Heriot-Watt University.

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procurement leaders
June 26, 2026

AI Is Good at Picking Qualified Suppliers. It Still Struggles to Pick the Best One.

Companies are rapidly integrating generative AI into procurement and sourcing decisions. The promise is obvious. AI can read thousands of pages of supplier proposals faster than any human team, summarize technical requirements in seconds, and create the appearance of consistency and objectivity in evaluation. But there is an important distinction managers are starting to overlook. The same AI system that performs extremely well at identifying whether a supplier meets minimum requirements may perform much less reliably when judging which supplier is truly better. Recent research published in the Journal of Business Logistics examined this issue by comparing how large language models evaluated supplier bids against evaluations completed by experienced procurement professionals. It analyzed 123 supplier proposals tied to 31 public procurement projects conducted by the State of Ohio between 2023 and 2024. The projects involved complex IT services contracts, many containing large, text-heavy bid packages requiring evaluative judgment rather than simple arithmetic comparisons. The researchers tested three reasoning-oriented AI models: OpenAI o3, Grok-3-Mini, and DeepSeek R1. They then compared their evaluations against human procurement scores. The findings revealed a surprisingly clear pattern. AI performed well when evaluating compliance signals. These are signals tied to baseline qualifications and technical requirements. Does…
supply chain decision velocity
March 6, 2026

The High Cost of Labor Firefighting and Systemic Attrition

Warehouses are not running out of labor. They are running out of labor that can sustain the pace. Manual firefighting, overtime, and constant reassignment push skilled associates to burn out faster than they can be replaced. The result is a cycle of turnover, training, and rising labor costs that slow performance and strain budgets. This whitepaper breaks down the current state of labor in distribution, including turnover trends, overtime risk, burnout dynamics, and the true cost of churn. Click here to download and see how labor forces impact throughput, planning, and workforce strategy today.