NextGen Supply Chain: Drop-ins at MIT’s Crossroads 2018

Every year, MIT brings together supply chain professionals from around the country with researchers and faculty members from the university’s various departments for a one-day conference. Here are some of my takeaways from this year’s Crossroads event. 

Drop-in #1 – The evolution of artificial intelligence

Deep learning is now the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI), says Adam Fisch, a first-year Ph. D. student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. It involves several different layers of computations that are passed on to the next layer often in parallel with other computations. The “deep” label comes from the many different computation layers before developing an output.

The leading deep learning users today include:autonomous vehicles, speech interfaces and conversational agents as well as advanced game playing. Fisch says robotics will be next to benefit from deep learning.

He identifies several key issues to watch with deep learning AI in the next five years: distributed collections of devices that learn; data security; and bi-directional communication with complex systems.

Drop-in #2 – AI in action today across industry

At Intel 

“We’re using AI as a sourcing technology for our global supply chain,” says Jason McDowell from Intel’s supply chain intelligence and analytics team. According to McDowell,  AI uses Web scrapes to identify potential suppliers and compare them with current suppliers. Social media is part of the research. And, there is internal strategic pressure from the top down to do this. “AI is now a core technology for all supply chain employees. Without it, we can no longer support changes in our business,” McDowell adds. “AI is sure to provide more the supply chain more transparent and seamless going forward.’

At Damco, a part of A.P. Moller - Maersk

Erez Agmoni, a member of Damco’s Asia regional supply chain development department, notes that “In our drive to develop innovative supply chain solutions, we focus on freight forwarding and related activities. For us, collaboration is key to developing AI and related technologies. We feel a great sense of urgency. And that means collaboration across the supply chain is critical to making AI a key player in the movement of goods globally.”

He adds, “In the future, AI will play a large role in autonomous vehicles including marine vessels as well as cargo tracking and transit times.”

At BASF

Whether it is AI or some other technology, it has to deliver a return. “We don’t deploy automation for the sake of automation,” says Markus Kiffl from BASF’s Global Supply Chain & Logistics Center of Expertise. “A big focus of AI is turning big data into smart data. We get right down to the operations level by using AI for invoice verification and other mundane but important tasks. Making that happen requires a change in mindset for both staffing and behaviors. There is no template to apply AI and other forms of digitization. Going forward, I see AI providing the link between database lakes.”

At Shell

“The energy landscape is changing rapidly and AI will be a critical enabler for us to keep pace with the changes,” says Esme Fantozzi from Shell’s Deep Water team in the Gulf of Mexico. AI won’t work all by itself. Sensors and tracking technologies will be key suppliers of data to feed AI. “To make all this happen,” he notes, “we have to start to treat data as an asset. We aren’t there yet. Looking to the future, I see AI playing a key role in predictive maintenance.”

Drop-in #3 -  Autonomous vehicles on the move

The takeaway here was surprising.

The story of autonomous vehicles is much more than using AI to direct an over-the-road vehicle’s movements without human involvement. That’s according to Dr. John Leonard, associate department head for research at MIT’s department of mechanical engineering. Leonard is also vice president of autonomous driving research at the Toyota Research Institute. He identifies seven key issues affecting the advancement of autonomous vehicles:

• Technological
• Economic
• Employment
• Ethical
• Legal
• Security
• Environmental

That’s quite a list. And what’s under the surface in it is staggering. After 45 minutes of listening to Leonard, it became clear that it is much more likely that autonomous vehicles will be commonplace 10 years from now, and not 5. As someone who has written a little about this subject, I have to admit I never saw that one coming.

Drop-in #4 – Talking about conversational commerce

Think Alexa, Siri and Google Home here. We are in the early stages not just of the technology but of having it embedded in the supply chain, explains Dr. Brian Subirana, director of the MIT Auto-ID Laboratory.

But the potential is huge. Subirana calls conversational commerce disruptive. For a point of comparison, he sees many other advances from route optimization to real-time operations as merely incremental. For more details on the trajectory of conversational commerce, see the NextGen Interview with Subirana in this issue.

Gary Forger is the special projects editor for Supply Chain Management Review. He can be reached at [email protected].