Piet Buyck is the Senior Vice President and Solution Principal at Logility, an Aptean company. A global technology executive with over 30 years of experience in supply chain management, Buyck has spent his career disrupting analog practices to address the messy reality of operations.
His work focuses on making artificial intelligence accessible and explainable, ensuring it keeps human decision-makers firmly in control.
In this interview, we discuss his new book, The AI Compass for Supply Chain Leaders, where Buyck outlines a framework for rethinking how we plan, align, and communicate across systems to navigate uncertainty.
M.R. Rangaswami: What is the most critical shift supply chain leaders need to make today?
Piet Buyck: Supply chain leaders are operating with better resources than ever before. Their teams are highly educated and well-trained, and their technology has never been more capable. Bringing these two together is the most critical shift that supply chain leaders need to make today.
Specifically, they need to move away from static, number-based planning tools like spreadsheets and reports toward a language of planning that uses natural language interaction and real-time collaboration to anticipate supply chain challenges and convert supply chain uncertainty into opportunities for competitive differentiation.
M.R.: Explain the difference between anti-fragility and resilience. How can leaders use AI to turn volatility into a competitive advantage?
Piet: Modern supply chains are extremely complicated. Even modest changes can cause a bullwhip effect upstream. Whether it’s a global pandemic, a blocked canal, or a regional conflict, the industry has worked hard to become resilient and withstand these disruptions.
Supply chain leaders understand this problem, and the industry has worked very hard to become more resilient and withstand disruptions across many fronts.
Now, we need to go a step further.
Anti-fragility is a state where a supply chain withstands volatility and even benefits from it by assessing and capitalizing on change. AI allows teams to validate new assumptions against real-time events and remake plans in hours.
M.R.: There is often fear that AI will replace jobs. How should organizations view the relationship between AI and human planners to maximize results?
Piet: Rather than displacing people, AI moves them to the center of machine-assisted processes. As supply chain management becomes more digital, AI acts as a catalyst for Kaizen, the philosophy of continuous, incremental improvement.
For example, natural language interfaces make GenAI accessible to non-technical employees, allowing them to synthesize unstructured data and turn inscrutable numbers into workflow insights.
While agentic AI will eventually execute tasks like humans, it cannot assume responsibility. Consequently, while we will see fewer roles focused on data assembly, we will see a rise in roles centered on strategy, scenario planning, and decision-making.