131 operational level. People will continue to set strategy, define outcomes, approve exceptions and make trade-offs between service, cost, inventory and resilience, while agents orchestrate and continuously optimise day-to-day operations. That transition, however, will not happen everywhere at once. Rodriguez says the fastest adoption is likely to come in highfrequency, lower-stakes decisions such as carrier selection and re-routing, warehouse labour allocation, invoice matching and high-volume, low-attention procurement categories. “These are decisions made hundreds of times a day where the cost of being slow exceeds the cost of being wrong,” he says. Manufacturers are understandably more cautious when AI decisions affect uptime, safety or process control. For these areas, Rodriguez advocates a gradual approach, beginning with human-in-theloop recommendations inside governed guardrails and only introducing greater autonomy once confidence, controls and operating boundaries have been proven. “Autonomy is earned incrementally, not switched on,” he says. This shift from visibility to action is particularly important because the investment in supply chain visibility has not always delivered the expected results. Rodriguez notes that Microsoft expects around 85 per cent of organisations to “ Every signal updates decisions, every decision triggers action, and every outcome improves the next cycle” Photo: Microsoft FEATURE
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