Artificial intelligence has become the defining technology conversation of the decade. Every organization is exploring how AI can improve productivity, automate processes, and unlock new business value. Yet for supply chain leaders, the opportunity extends far beyond automation. AI has the potential to fundamentally change how organizations anticipate disruption, make decisions, and orchestrate outcomes across increasingly complex global supply networks.

However, there is a critical reality that many organizations are discovering: AI is only as powerful as the data behind it.

Without access to accurate, connected, and governed data, even the most advanced AI models produce incomplete insights and unreliable recommendations. For AI to deliver measurable business value, organizations must first solve one of the biggest challenges in supply chain management: bringing together fragmented data into a trusted, unified foundation.

This is where InterSystems delivers a unique advantage.

The Supply Chain Has a Data Problem

Modern supply chains generate enormous volumes of data every second. ERP systems manage orders and financials. Warehouse management systems track inventory. Transportation systems monitor shipments. Manufacturing execution systems oversee production. Supplier portals, IoT devices, clinical systems, weather feeds, and third-party logistics providers all contribute valuable information.

The problem isn’t a lack of data. It’s that the data lives in hundreds of disconnected systems. When disruptions occur, organizations often spend hours (or even days) collecting information before they can make a decision. Teams manually reconcile spreadsheets, validate conflicting reports, and coordinate across departments to understand what is happening.

By the time they reach a conclusion, the situation has often changed. AI cannot solve this problem if it only has access to fragments of the story. It requires a complete, trusted view of the enterprise.

Unified Data Is the Foundation for AI

InterSystems believes AI should not operate in isolation. It should be embedded within operational workflows and powered by real-time, trusted enterprise data.

Rather than requiring organizations to replace existing systems, InterSystems connects information across the entire supply chain, creating a unified, governed orchestration layer that makes data accessible wherever it resides.

This enables organizations to:

Eliminate data silos without large-scale migrations.

Deliver trusted, consistent data to AI models.

Provide real-time visibility across the supply chain.

Govern and secure enterprise information.

Create a single source of truth for operational decision-making.

With a unified data foundation, AI shifts from being an experimental technology to becoming a trusted decision-making partner.

Moving Beyond Visibility to Decision Intelligence

Visibility has long been a priority for supply chain leaders. Dashboards, reports, and analytics provide valuable insight into operations, but visibility alone doesn’t improve outcomes.

Organizations don’t need more dashboards. They need faster, better decisions. And they need to be able to understand not only what is happening, but what is likely to happen next and what actions will produce the best business outcome.

Instead of simply identifying that inventory is running low, AI can recommend how to rebalance inventory across distribution centers. Instead of highlighting a supplier delay, AI can identify alternative sourcing options before production is affected. Instead of reporting missed service levels, AI can recommend corrective actions before customers experience disruptions.

This evolution from descriptive analytics to decision intelligence is where AI delivers its greatest value.

The Future Is AI-Enabled Decision Intelligence

As supply chains become increasingly interconnected and dynamic, organizations need more than automation. They need intelligence that continuously analyzes operations, identifies emerging risks, and orchestrates the best possible outcomes.

This future depends on more than large language models or predictive algorithms. It depends on trusted data, interoperability, governance, and seamless integration across the enterprise.

These are the capabilities InterSystems has delivered for decades.

By combining a unified data platform with AI-enabled decision intelligence and supply chain orchestration, InterSystems helps organizations transform fragmented information into actionable insight, enabling faster decisions, greater resilience, and measurable business value.

Introducing InterSystems AI Assistants

InterSystems has launched AI assistants for its two supply chain products: Supply Chain Orchestrator and Data Studio with supply chain module.

InterSystems Supply Chain Orchestrator® AI Assistant provides natural language support and allows business users to interact with features supported in Supply Chain Orchestrator. It provides help with three general capabilities.

Accessing supply chain data. This can be a direct query of a specific data entry like a customer order, or a query on aggregated data such as revenue by region and timeline.

Decision assistant. This helps users understand the business logic/rules used for actionable insights through Supply Chain Orchestrator issue analysis.

Memory management. This helps the user understand a specific industry better or minimize user prompts by keeping user-specific preferences or settings, for example. This capability includes short-term and long-term memory management and global and user level memory management.

Supply Chain Orchestrator provides specialized AI agents that augment human decision making and support intelligent business processes. Data agents allow both technical and business users to discover, access, prepare, enrich, and contextualize information from across the enterprise.

Business process agents monitor operations, identify exceptions, coordinate workflows, and recommend or execute actions according to customer-specific business policies, rules, and operational processes. And memory and context agents maintain business context, organizational knowledge, historical decisions, customer-specific operating practices, and industry expertise.

InterSystems Data Studio™ AI Assistant is a low-code generative AI extension for Data Studio that adds intelligent assistants, out-of-the-box agents, and a multi-agent framework. It is designed to help organizations easily explore, analyze, and query structured and unstructured data and visualize answers using a natural language conversational interface.

AI Assistant is designed to work across all of the data that organizations already have. By leveraging the underlying capabilities of Data Studio to connect, harmonize, govern, and manage information across operational applications, databases, data warehouses, cloud services, and other data sources, organizations can create and maintain a unified, consistent, and governed data layer that AI Assistant can leverage to generate more meaningful insights. By giving business users, analysts, applications, and AI assistants access to a single trusted and governed information foundation, organizations can reduce complexity and increase confidence in the accuracy of AI-driven insights and answers.

AI Assistant provides both out-of-the-box agents and a multi-agent framework that enables organizations to build custom assistants capable of orchestrating multiple agents to address domain specific use cases, with custom data sets, rules, and permissions. Rather than relying solely on a single request-and-response pattern, multiple agents can work together to perform more sophisticated analysis and reasoning. For business users, this creates a more accurate and intuitive way to get answers and explore information across business documents and applications. For organizations, it provides an AI foundation capable of supporting more complex queries, delivering more accurate insights, and enabling deeper analysis across enterprise information.

Final Thought

The companies that succeed in the AI era will not simply have access to more data. They will be the organizations that can trust their data, connect their operations, and turn intelligence into action.

That’s where AI delivers its greatest value, and where InterSystems helps organizations lead.

Chris Cunnane is the Global Product Marketing Manager for Supply Chain at InterSystems. In this role, he is responsible for developing and executing marketing strategy and content for the InterSystems supply chain technology suite. Chris has 20+ years of supply chain expertise, leading the supply chain practice at ARC Advisory Group, as well as holding various sales, marketing, and operations roles in the wholesale, retail, and automotive parts markets. He holds a BA in Communications from Stonehill College and an MA in Global Marketing Communications from Emerson College.

The post AI in Supply Chains: Why Trusted Data Is the Competitive Advantage appeared first on Logistics Viewpoints.

Warehouse automation is advancing quickly. Automated storage and retrieval systems, autonomous mobile robots, robotic picking, sophisticated warehouse management systems, and increasingly intelligent execution software are changing how goods move through distribution facilities. But installing more technology does not automatically create a modern warehouse. In many operations, the physical technology is advancing faster than the operating model surrounding it. A warehouse may introduce robotics into one process, automated storage into another, and new software on top of both, while still relying on procedures, labor structures, and decision-making processes originally built around predominantly manual operations.

That mismatch is becoming increasingly important. As fulfillment requirements become more complex, warehouse modernization needs to move beyond a discussion about which technology to deploy. The bigger question is how the operation itself must change when people, software, and automation increasingly perform work together.

From a Manual Operation to a Technology-Enabled System

Historically, warehouse operations were designed largely around the movement of people. Workers traveled to storage locations, searched for inventory, picked products, moved carts or pallets, sorted orders, and delivered goods to packing and shipping areas. Warehouse management systems helped coordinate this activity, but execution ultimately depended heavily on people moving through the building. Automation changes that fundamental relationship.

In a goods-to-person environment, for example, the employee may remain at a workstation while inventory moves to that person. An AS/RS can replace portions of traditional storage and retrieval activity. Mobile robots can take over transportation between operating areas. Robotic picking can potentially shift additional handling activities away from employees.

As those technologies accumulate, the warehouse becomes less like a collection of independent processes and more like an interconnected operating system. This is important because the performance of one technology increasingly depends on everything around it. A high-throughput storage system provides limited value if downstream picking or packing cannot absorb its output. Likewise, adding robots to one activity may simply move a bottleneck somewhere else. A technically successful automation project can therefore fail to produce the expected operational improvement if the surrounding operation has not been redesigned accordingly.

Fulfillment Is Getting More Complicated

At the same time, the operating environment warehouses must support is becoming more demanding. Facilities may need to accommodate different order profiles, service requirements, inventory characteristics, customer expectations, and order volumes within the same operation. The result is greater pressure on warehouse processes to be both productive and adaptable. This makes the traditional approach of automating an isolated process increasingly problematic.The right question is not simply,“Can we automate this task?” It is,“How should this process operate if automation becomes part of it?”

That distinction sounds subtle, but it can fundamentally change an automation strategy. Instead of starting with a technology and searching for somewhere to deploy it, operators can begin with order flows, constraints, labor requirements, inventory characteristics, throughput requirements, exceptions, and service expectations. Technology selection then becomes part of operational design rather than the objective itself.

Technology Deployment Is Not Operational Redesign

Warehouses can acquire impressive automation without changing how they manage the business. That is where modernization efforts can run into trouble. Automation changes where work occurs, who or what performs it, how quickly material moves, and which processes become dependent on one another. Those changes can require different staffing models, workflows, performance measures, maintenance strategies, exception-management processes, and supervisory responsibilities.

Consider a warehouse that introduces automated storage. The project is not only about storing and retrieving inventory faster. It can change replenishment strategy, order sequencing, picking activity, workstation design, inventory placement, labor allocation, and downstream capacity requirements. In other words, the machine cannot be evaluated separately from the process.

ARC’s WMS research reflects this broader shift. Current market trends include faster integration of new systems and robots, labor management expanding to coordinate people and robots, and increasing use of AI in warehouse execution and operational decision support. The implication is that modernization is increasingly an orchestration problem.

People, Software, and Automation Have to Operate as One System

The modern warehouse is unlikely to be completely manual or completely autonomous. For many facilities, the more realistic future is a mixed operating environment in which people and multiple types of automation work together. That presents a different management challenge.

Software needs visibility into inventory, orders, available resources, and equipment status. Automated equipment needs to receive the right work at the right time. Employees need clear responsibilities when normal automated flows encounter exceptions. Managers need performance measures that reveal the productivity of the overall operation rather than the speed of an individual machine. The objective, therefore, should not be to maximize automation. It should be to optimize the system.

This distinction will become even more important as emerging technologies enter the warehouse. ARC’s recent analysis of humanoid robots makes the same point from another angle: the business value of a new robot ultimately depends on how it fits with existing automation and warehouse execution rather than on the capabilities of the robot alone.

The Often-Overlooked Requirement: Organizational Readiness

There is also a human side to modernization. New technology changes jobs. Employees who previously performed repetitive material movement may increasingly supervise automated processes, resolve exceptions, interact with software, or work alongside robotic systems. Operations teams need to understand not only how equipment works, but also what to do when it does not work as planned. Management capabilities must evolve as well.

A highly automated facility creates different questions than a primarily manual warehouse. Where is the true bottleneck? Is poor performance caused by labor, equipment, software, inventory availability, or the interaction between them? Who owns performance when several interconnected systems contribute to the same workflow? These are operating-model questions, not technology specifications. And they should be addressed before, not after, automation is deployed.

The Modern Warehouse Is an Operating Model, Not a Technology Stack

The next phase of warehouse modernization will not be defined simply by how many robots are operating inside a facility or how much equipment has been automated. It will be defined by how successfully organizations redesign operations around those technologies. That means looking at automation as part of a broader system that includes facility processes, software, labor, inventory, management practices, and performance measurement. It also means recognizing that deploying technology and transforming an operation are not the same thing.

The companies that get the greatest value from warehouse automation will not necessarily be those that automate the most. They will be the ones that best determine where automation creates operational value, how it changes the surrounding process, and how people, software, and equipment should work together afterward. That is the real transition taking place in the modern warehouse.

The post Buying the Robots Is the Easy Part: Why Warehouse Modernization Requires an Operating Model Rethink appeared first on Logistics Viewpoints.

The next stage of Decision Intelligence is not simply better recommendations; it is governed action. Many platforms can already surface an insight or recommend a response, but the harder step is connecting that recommendation to explicit authority, executable workflow, and feedback so the organization can act faster without losing control.

Instead of generating a one-time answer, decision systems will increasingly monitor a class of decisions continuously, maintain the relevant context, and update the recommendation as state changes. That persistence is essential in supply chains because orders, inventory, capacity, risk, and execution status are always moving. The move from recommendation to governed action is the natural extension of Engineering the Decision Architecture, where context, authority, escalation, and execution are designed as one operating pathway.

ERP, planning, TMS, WMS, visibility, risk, and network platforms remain systems of record and execution; decision intelligence sits above and across them where context is assembled, tradeoffs are evaluated, actions are prioritized, and responses are coordinated. The architecture needs controlled mechanisms for a recommendation to become a transaction, workflow change, communication, or other physical-execution instruction.

Low-risk, frequent, reversible decisions can move first. Higher-value decisions may remain machine-recommended and human-approved. Novel or relationship-sensitive situations should escalate. The market will differentiate on how well providers encode these boundaries rather than on whether they use the word autonomous.

Buyers will require traceability into data used, options considered, approvals, confidence, actions, overrides, and outcomes. That record supports trust, compliance, performance improvement, and the gradual expansion of machine authority where evidence justifies it.

The provider archetypes—planning and optimization-led; visibility, event, and risk-led; decision-orchestration and AI-native; and suite, network, or enterprise-led approaches—will increasingly overlap around the signal-to-action loop. Some providers will deepen decisions; others will broaden reach; others will specialize in orchestration. The category will remain useful only if the qualification test stays tied to real decision impact.

The direction is therefore not from data to more analysis. It is from data to governed action, with intelligence embedded in the operating model and measured by the quality and speed of the decisions it improves.

The next boundary is governed execution

Decision Intelligence will become more consequential as recommendations move closer to execution. The progression is likely to be selective: systems assemble context, recommend options, prepare actions, and eventually execute bounded decisions where inputs, authority, reversibility, and consequence are well understood. High-consequence or ambiguous choices will remain human-led for longer.

That shift makes governance, observability, and execution connectivity central to the category. Buyers should look for explicit decision rights, confidence thresholds, approval logic, rollback or recovery paths, audit trails, and outcome measurement. The future intelligence layer will be judged less by how persuasive its recommendations sound and more by whether it can participate safely in the operating system.

Outcome learning will separate decision systems from recommendation engines

As Decision Intelligence moves closer to action, the system should be able to observe what happened after a recommendation was accepted, modified, or rejected. That creates a feedback loop connecting decision context to outcome rather than merely recording model output. Over time, organizations can identify which decision classes are consistently successful, where humans add value, where policies are too restrictive, and where automation can safely expand. This learning layer will matter because governed action is not a one-time configuration problem; it is a lifecycle discipline in which authority should evolve only as operational evidence supports it.

The 2026 Market Map is designed to help organizations understand the structure of the Decision Intelligence market, evaluate provider differences, and identify the capabilities most relevant to their operating environment. If your organization is evaluating Decision Intelligence platforms or clarifying where decision intelligence fits within the broader technology architecture, I would be glad to provide the Market Map brochure and discuss the evaluation questions and provider differences most relevant to your requirements.

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