HELPING SMARTER

application of AI technologies across all aspects of business, including supply chain.

One such organisation is UST Global, a multinational digital transformation company that provides IT services and solutions to a variety of industries, including healthcare, banking, financial services, retail, and hi-tech.

UST has its own supply chain practice headed up by lead consultant Jonathan Colehower, who has spoken at Procurement and Supply Chain LIVE events about the digital transformation of the supply chain.

In March 2022, UST announced a strategic partnership with AI enterprise software company o9 Solutions to provide effective supply chain management solutions, as well as propel digital transformation for enterprise clients. With its planning and decision-making software, o9 Solutions enables organisations to accelerate the digital transformation of their supply chain functions, driving the digital transformations of integrated planning and operations capabilities.

The company’s move is typical of how the supply chain technology ecosystem is responding to the supply needs of businesses. The partnership combines UST’s systems integration and strategic knowledge expertise with o9’s AI-powered supply chain, revenue, and P&L planning and decisionmaking platform

But UST also has its own deep AI expertise, in the shape of Dr Adnan Masood, its Chief AI Officer & Lead Architect. Masood is also a visiting scholar at Stanford University. There are few people better placed to discuss the importance of AI to businesses in general, and supply chain in particular.

AI is about repeatability

Speaking to an audience at an AI conference in London Masood summed up the business uses of AI as being about “creating a repeatable approach to processes through the ecosystem of an organisation, and how that can be used to transfer information”.

He says that mining such processes with AI requires “multiple intelligent components to work with multiple modalities”.

This, he says, is the building blocks for enterprise AI, and for UST’s platform, called SmartOps. This, says Masood, “is automation on steroids”.

He adds: “SmartOps is an AI-powered intelligent operations platform built with the pillars of automation – knowledge management, intelligent monitoring and autonomous operations.

UST SmartOps is an AI-powered cognitive automation platform that holistically learns and reimagines your business processes while intelligently digitising and compressing manual workflows.”

Running on AWS, SmartOps works across business and IT operations, including help desks and onboarding tools. It optimises