AI’s Positive Impact on Business Decision Making: What We Learned at 2024 Gartner® Events

We recently attended the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo in Orlando and Barcelona and the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit in London. At our speaking sessions and conversations on the conference floor, there was a great deal of excitement around AI and the positive impacts Decision Intelligence is having on business performance, sustainability, and the future of work.

Here are three key themes that emerged from those conversations across the three events.

Decision Intelligence is delivering rapid value for early adopters

Our CEO, Fred Laluyaux, has been a passionate advocate for Decision Intelligence for many years. “We're happy to see on the shop floor today, and throughout this conference, that the concept of decision automation and Decision Intelligence is really now becoming a megatrend,” Fred said at our session in Barcelona.

That value resonated in the stories shared by our customers who have pioneered AI to digitize, augment, and automate business decisions.

In Barcelona, Francis Castro, vice president of customer technology at Unilever, joined Fred on stage to discuss how Decision Intelligence has helped his company become more agile and efficient.

“Speed matters. Today, speed is the currency,” Francis said. He described why Unilever adopted Aera Decision Cloud™ as part of a simplified technology landscape that enables Unilever to operate more quickly and efficiently — forming “a layer of Decision Intelligence” over their systems of record and differentiation.

“This is where we believe that Decision Intelligence is really supporting that differentiation layer, to get better automated decisions,” Francis said. With AI, he said, teams now can answer questions about how best to serve customers, optimize inventory levels, and position stock at distribution centers.

In Orlando, Wendy Herrick, senior vice president of customer operations, North America at Unilever, shared the positive impacts of Decision Intelligence for the business as a whole.

It's not just looking at business metrics, right? It's really looking across all your stakeholders,” Wendy said — from ensuring growth and profitability for shareholders, to growing the business efficiently, to ensuring that employees have the best possible experience.

“Are you the employer of choice?” Wendy continued. “Are you creating the jobs of the future? Are you moving the transactional low value work out of the day-to-day and really creating roles for the future where you have decision makers, not data gatherers and reporters?”

More companies now trust AI to enable better, faster decision making

In recent years, the digitization of the economy has created unprecedented challenges for global supply chains. As Fred noted in our speaking session in Orlando, even at large organizations with hundreds of planners, the speed, granularity, and complexity of decisions has reached a point where people cannot keep up.

Decision Intelligence has addressed these challenges for global leaders in CPG, pharmaceuticals, oil & gas, technology, and manufacturing.

Those early adopters are finding success by focusing not just on technology, but on understanding and improving decision-making processes and building trust in AI to make those decisions.

“Any planner that I've ever been introduced to – they know their category, right?” Wendy said. Unlike other solutions where decisions are made in a “black box” without transparency, Aera gives users a clear view of the data and logic behind each recommendation. As Wendy explained, “The beauty of it was, it’s a clear box – you can see what it's doing, you can see what it's recommending, and the user can actually see what's going on, so that trust starts to build.”

Over time, continuous learning and optimization result in fewer exceptions and fewer recommendations being rejected. As a result, planners have more time to focus on high-value and strategic decisions, reducing the time and effort required to make decisions.

AI makes it possible to address decisions that previously went unmade

In our London speaking session, “Moving from BI to AI with Decision Intelligence,” Fred and Marinaldo Gomes, global head of IT at British American Tobacco (BAT), discussed how enterprises are overcoming data challenges, capturing business value, and reducing bias in decision-making processes.

Marinaldo described how BAT, a global company with hundreds of suppliers and a worldwide network of factories and support facilities, moved from a traditional sequential supply chain to a system of modern, digitally-enabled supply networks.

Without Decision Intelligence, Marinaldo said, planners had to respond to alerts from the APS by manually gathering data and running scenarios in order to determine the best response to challenges.

Today, Aera integrates data and systems across BAT’s supply chain into a central control tower for autonomous decision making. This process of digitizing and automating decisions has improved the company’s ability to react to potential shortages that could impact demand, fulfillment, or cost.

In one instance, Marinaldo said Aera had reduced the time spent on performing analysis by 90 percent.

“The idea now is to close the loop,” Marinaldo said, incorporating more data sources and freeing team members’ time to focus on higher-value tasks.

Fred noted that, while much attention has been paid to “black swan” events and disruptions, AI is making it possible for teams to optimize the thousands of “micro-events” that occur constantly throughout the day. Decision Intelligence not only improves the quality of decisions, but shines a light on the opportunity to address decisions that were previously left unmade.

2024 will be a pivotal year for Decision Intelligence

The biggest takeaway from our conversations at recent Gartner events was the importance of taking the first step toward improving decision making with AI.

As we’ve heard many times from customers, the key is to have a clear vision for what you want to achieve, then build the right team and choose partners who can help you achieve it. The companies that move to implement AI-powered decision making and decision automation today will be positioned to gain value in the near term — and to create and adopt new ways of working that will deliver increasing value over time.

Meet Aera in September at the North American Supply Chain Executive Summit — click here to learn more.