The fundamental role of executives is to work out what is most important, and what is not.  That means we are constantly fighting our way through a barrage of buzzwords meant to catch our attention and influence our thinking.  One of the buzzwords that is hitting all of us incessantly right now is “AI Agents.”  I’m here to tell you that this is a buzzword that you should pay attention to.

Let me explain.  There is no doubt that the amazing capabilities of online AI services (like ChatGPT, Gemini, Co-pilot and others) to understand and generate text and images, to analyse and summarise large volumes of information, and to solve complex analytical problems, are changing how we conceptualise many of the challenges we face, but these are technologies.  What enterprises need are solutions, which is where AI Agents come in.  Agents are the apps of the enterprise AI world: Compact, targeted applications which can be assembled into the solutions that actually enable our organisations to get more done, more efficiently.

Each Agent is a small piece of software with one or more AI technologies under the hood, specialised to carry out a specific task.  At Oii, we have an agent to analyse lead time and lead time variability, we have another that works out patterns in demand and projects demand variability over the next year so that we can prepare our customers’ supply chains for what is coming.  We have an agent that can answer complex questions about supply chain efficiency and cost-service tradeoffs through natural conversations.  We even have one that can create new supply chain designs to compare in what-if scenarios.

The AI technology creating the intelligence of each of these agents has been tuned by us to be a specialist in the particular problem it solves, and because these are not generalist online AI services they are very good at what they do.  As a bonus, because they live within our infrastructure, no customer data is ever sent to an outside organisation.

AI Agents are a win-win for the enterprise: Smarter solutions without privacy and security compromises.

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