Digital supply networks and cognitive automation

Automation in the supply chain is nothing new. From the earliest days of industrialization through the present time, increasingly sophisticated automation technologies serve to drive new levels of efficiencies. Historically, automation has focused on physical tasks, making them more efficient. As technologies continue to advance, however, they may offer new ways for supply chain organizations to achieve efficiencies within areas of business operations where automation was previously considered to be impossible--areas such as thought and reason. At one level, cognitive technologies, also known as artificial intelligence (AI), continue the tradition of automating physical tasks that previous generations of automation technologies offered. But they can also go further, taking the concept of automation to the next level by automating jobs that we ordinarily associate with mental processing, learning and self-correction, sensing, and judgment--in other words, the very things that we consider to be higher-level "human" thought. And so human thought now exists along the spectrum of automation: from repeatable, predictable tasks that replicate physical labor to reasoning and decision-making.