130 INDUSTRIALS & MANUFACTURING visibility From autonomous action AI, connected data and partner expertise are helping manufacturers move towards autonomous operations. Richard Humphreys asks Microsoft’s Alfonso Rodriguez more For much of the past decade, manufacturers have focused on improving visibility across increasingly complex supply chains. But while businesses now have access to more data than ever before, this does not necessarily translate into faster or better decisions. To achieve that, businesses must turn this information into action, says Alfonso Rodriguez, head of marketing for Microsoft for Manufacturing. Rather than operating as a decision-support tool that periodically provides recommendations, AI is becoming an active participant in supply chain operations – sensing what is happening, planning a response, executing it and learning from the outcome. “Today, most supply chains still operate in silos – fragmented data across systems, manual decision-making, and planning cycles that run periodically rather than continuously,” says Rodriguez. “What’s changing is that AI is moving inside the operating rhythm itself: sense, plan, execute, monitor, learn.” He describes this as a closed loop rather than a sequential process, where “every signal updates decisions, every decision triggers action, and every outcome improves the next cycle.” Rodriguez believes that, within three to five years, humans will increasingly operate at the strategic decision level while AI handles autonomous execution at the to
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