AI adoption in the supply chain is a bigger problem than technology. I can't say that enough. The technology is there. If you had an entire group of people who were wildly fired up about deploying it, you'd make incredible strides in days or weeks, not months or years. We see that here at Trax. The bottleneck is almost never the tech.
There's a famous saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast. It's 100% correct.
Walk Right Into the Fear
The first thing you have to do as a leader is identify what's blocking the people in your organization. Years ago, I started telling my team we were going to adopt AI. The immediate reaction was fear. They were worried it would take their jobs.
I told them that if they participated and pushed this forward, and it did automate their role, I would pay to have them retrained for a higher-paying job. Probably two to three times what they were making. And I was going to keep doing that until all I had was a bunch of incredibly well-educated AI professionals.
If, as a leader, you can't promise people that you'll invest in them when they help you, they won't help you. They'll defend their own fort, as all of us would. Walk right into the fear. Start asking the hard questions. What are you afraid of? Are you worried you might lose your job?
Set Guardrails Without Locking Everything Down
All of us have requirements. Contractual obligations. Security considerations. Areas of the business we want to prioritize. You need a governance model that gives people clarity on where they can operate.
I'm not saying clamp things down so tight that no one can move in any direction. But make sure everybody knows the guardrails. At Trax, we've got different guardrails for different teams. Product and engineering has a different mandate and governance than operations. In each group, we're pointing them in specific directions and telling them what they need to go look for and how far they need to define it. That structure is what lets small teams make real progress.
Organize for Speed
If you're trying to drive change with an organization that's set up the same way it was two years ago, you're going to have a hard time. We've been through about five years of constant reorganization at Trax, and we're doing it again.
One example is forward-deployed engineers. We take a small team, deploy them to a specific problem, and they're required to fix it within the confines of our governance model. Google talked about this decades ago. Small teams make big differences. That's been true in our experience.
Technology Won't Fix This for You
Get the culture right. Get the governance model right. Organize your teams correctly. You'll have a wild amount of success with AI adoption in the supply chain. But no technology in the world is going to fix those problems for you. As a leader, you have to confront the brutal facts of the day and teach your team to move forward. That's the job.
Interested in how Trax is building an AI-ready culture across global supply chains? Explore our resources or connect with our team today.