Consumption-Based Forecasting and Planning

CHAPTER 6Intelligent Automation Is Disrupting Demand Planning

Business leaders are embracing automation not just to take advantage of the breakthrough pace of digital change, but also to create a new digital ecosystem where they hold competitive advantage. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the newest recruit to the workforce, bringing new skills and automation to help people do new jobs, and reinventing what's possible.¹ The impressive advances in AI and machine learning (ML) over the past decade have been supported by supervised deep learning: training ML algorithms to perform narrow, single-domain tasks. The learning is supervised because you're telling the algorithm the correct answer (the label) as it is exposed to many examples using big data. We're now seeing unsupervised learning systems that learn faster, require less data, and achieve impressive performance. These supervised and unsupervised “intelligent automation” techniques can help experts achieve automation while enriching their domain expertise to do their work more effectively—not to eliminate or replace these experts.

The challenge is that people have not yet developed the level of trust in artificial intelligence and machine learning that they have in other technologies that automate tasks. People sometimes confuse automation with autonomy. Intelligent automation (IA) techniques can be applied to all kinds of activities across your organization to reduce the everyday repetitive work while uncovering key insights ...