We asked 8 supply chain leaders what impressed and surprised them most about AI. Here's what they said.

Airplane parts need thorough inspections, and AI can help — but only if data is up to snuff

A food-safety expert explains why more recalls aren't necessarily a bad thing — and how AI plays a role

Nissan's AI-powered factory robots can haul 4,000 pounds — and call each other for backup

A series exploring the companies, leaders, and workers who are at the forefront of the AI supply-chain revolution.

Seaports are exploring AI to plan complex movements from water to land, warehouses are flying AI-powered drones to reduce backorders and boost worker satisfaction, and logistics companies are using AI's predictive capabilities to alleviate the headaches of last-mile deliveries.

We asked eight supply chain management leaders who oversee manufacturing, technology, logistics, and sustainability, and more, to share what has impressed and surprised them most about AI in their fields.

"The one that still excites me is simple in concept and was very hard to execute before AI: we take whatever a customer sends us, in whatever format and through whatever channel they prefer, and turn it into something our systems can act on."

"Email tenders build straight into our platform. A bid arrives however the customer built it, and AI reshapes it so our pricing platforms can act on it directly. Work that took hours takes minutes; work that took minutes takes seconds. And no customer had to change a thing."

"For a large grocery retailer, we recently leveraged our AI-powered gate automation services to help them investigate a potential cargo theft case."

"With computer vision at the gate, they had indisputable video footage of the carrier and driver, which meant they could make a claim to recover $60,000. That's the kind of thing companies used to have to write off."

Mantej Singh Randhawa, global growth leader of supply chain at Genpact:

"A lack of shared understanding around what it actually means in practice. You can ask 10 supply chain employees to define agentic AI and get 10 different answers."