April 24, 2025 The Future of Supply Chains is Agentic. Are You Ready?

Agentic AI systems are the next step in the evolution of AI that is giving global organizations an edge.

By Thomas Strain, Vice President of Technology, Surgere

At every stage of manufacturing, information matters: From production process control to locating goods during manufacture and delivery, you need real-time visibility to make the right decisions, optimize your systems, and avoid disruptions.

But information itself isn’t going to improve your business or keep you competitive. You need people equipped with tools that will make the most effective use of all the data your operation produces.

Agentic artificial intelligence systems are the next step in the AI evolution that is already giving an edge to organizations globally. Improved inventory levels, better service levels, and reduced logistics costs are among the benefits experienced by early adopters of AI technology in supply chain management.

Where generative and other traditional AI systems require human input to train the program and create new content, agentic AI has a higher degree of autonomy and can generate actions and decisions without human intervention. Using machine learning and natural language processing, agentic AI is always building on its previous experiences and incorporating new data with historical information.

What this means is that agentic AI can make measurable, real-world differences in manufacturing supply chain management.

Efficiency, Productivity, and Resilience

With agentic AI, you can streamline operations by automating workflows, tracking shipments in real time, planning and optimizing loads and routes, and even enhancing customer service. As a result, people can focus on handling more complex and often nuanced tasks involving real-world interactions. Any operation runs more smoothly when its team members can spend more time doing what they do best.

Agentic AI is also capable of assessing operations and suggesting productivity improvements to your workflows. For example, how many touch points are in your manufacturing process? Sourcing, procurement, packaging, labeling – the list may go on, and agentic AI can analyze them to see whether it’s possible to reduce the number with no adverse effects on product quality.

In pursuit of supply chain resilience, agentic AI systems perform advanced analytics on high volumes of data to deliver all the needed information to supply chain managers. Unlike traditional AI tools which require a human to identify the data and guide analysis through a series of prompts, agentic AI handles the task itself based on analyses it has already performed.

Innovation and Integration

Agentic AI’s ability to continuously learn from previous tasks and a constant influx of real-time data is what sets it apart from previous AI tools. Where one forecast might spot a possible stockout in the future, agentic AI can tell you whether that demand is a sign of a trend or just an outlier that doesn’t necessitate a major production shift. Information can be gleaned from market trends, competitor information, historical statistics and more, enabling AI to notice things like rising costs before proactively developing a solution. It can even run analyses you may not have considered. It’s all about delivering insights that help you improve your supply chain.

When you use agentic AI in conjunction with other leading-edge technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain, the result is an even smarter system. IoT generally refers to the software which powers data-collecting devices that provide information on data points such as machine health status, asset tracking, and production rates. Other examples include sensors powering smart warehouses, and packages that monitor transportation and storage environmental conditions. A blockchain is a secure database that allows for the exchange of encrypted data by multiple parties. When everyone has real-time access to all transactions in a vendor database, for instance, it eliminates the need for updating and reconciling individual accounting systems.

Standing Still Means Falling Behind

Maybe your production lines are running fine. Maybe the supply chain tools you’re using are adequate and your teams are operating optimally. But in manufacturing, few things are more constant than change and unforeseen complications. Agentic AI digs deeper into a larger mine of historical data than traditional systems to reveal new insights and empower more accurate predictive analyses. Better forecasting means less risk of excess inventory and wasted production resources.

You’ll also discover a better understanding of your customers, putting you in a position to amplify the strengths of your unique value proposition, provide more precise services, and identify new business opportunities. Your team will be better informed to make important decisions and explore newly discovered possibilities.

In other words, integrating agentic AI into your manufacturing supply chain ultimately helps you get the most out of your most valuable manufacturing resource: The talented humans who make everything happen.

About the Author:
Thomas Strain is Surgere’s vice president of technology and leads Surgere’s technology organization as well as its hardware integration to bring data-driven supply chain software solutions and AI platforms to the market. Strain holds a M.S. in Information Technology from the Florida Institute of Technology and a B.S. in Computer Information Systems from Saint Leo University. Learn more and discover how to leverage Surgere’s supply chain expertise here.

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