For more than 50 years, Davos, the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, has been an important barometer of economic, political, social, and environmental issues affecting the future of the world. So, what topics are driving the agenda for Davos 2022? The global supply chain crisis has taken on a new meaning. As the pandemic spread rapidly in 2020 and lingered in 2021, the general consensus was that disruptions to the global supply chain would be temporary albeit costly. But in 2022, it is clear that fragile supply chain may exist in a perpetual state of disruption for quite some time. In fact, the global supply chain was always in a fragile state; the pandemic laid bare just how vulnerable it was all along.

Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that while AI was better than humans at data-driven decision making tasks, it was still inferior to humans for cognitive and creative ones. But in the past two years language-based AI has advanced by leaps and bounds, changing common notions of what this technology can do. The most visible advances have been in what's called "natural language processing" (NLP), the branch of AI focused on how computers can process language like humans do. It has been used to write an article for The Guardian, and AI-authored blog posts have gone viral -- feats that weren't possible a few years ago. AI even excels at cognitive tasks like programming where it is able to generate programs for simple video games from human instructions.

The industry may be emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic, with e-commerce still thriving on it, but the supply chain crisis isn't going away. Infrastructure designed in a predictable pre-pandemic world isn't enough to clear the backlogs, and may even be making a bad situation worse. Could artificial intelligence (AI) be the technology that gets things moving again? Organisations certainly believe so, according to a new 3Gem report for Blue Yonder, which finds that more than half (53%) of UK supply chain decision-makers believe AI advances are key to managing disruption. This confidence in AI owes much to its promise of visibility.