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Ajith Thomas
Global Head of Supply Chain and Sourcing & Procurement for Enterprise Cognitive Business Operations, TCS
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The first flashes a warning that a key customer’s shipment is late. If it doesn’t leave the dock within the hour, the firm may be in breach of a service level agreement. The second insists that a cheaper freight option has been found but only if they delay dispatch until the weekend and increase the volume dispatched. The third warns of stocks piling up in a regional hub. And the fourth demands excess capacity be diverted to a different region where forecasts show a surge in demand.
This is the daily theatre of modern supply chains: constant triage, where every decision is a wager on trust, capital, and capacity. It is also where the next great shift in corporate decision-making is underway
Supply chains have always been a balancing act where decisions are made across four strategic priorities:
The competitive edge lies in sustaining equilibrium across competing objectives. The gap between leaders and laggards is defined by the decision environment built to serve them.
Research from MIT Sloan Management Review and TCS research shows how Intelligent Choice Architectures (ICAs) address this tension. They don’t chase a single “best” answer; they shape the decision environment so trade-offs across the four priorities of service, cost, inventory, and growth are surfaced clearly, weighed consistently, and acted on with foresight.
In most enterprises, decision-making still lives in functional silos. Demand planners, procurement managers, and logistics teams work from their own dashboards, their own KPIs, and their own judgment calls.
Data is often partial and uneven. A procurement head may see supplier lead times but not shifting market demand. The sale order manager prioritises speed of fulfilment over considering stock levels across multiple warehouses. A logistics team may focus on cost per shipment without visibility into the revenue impact of delays. For after-sales teams, prioritising faster settlement of warranty claims for better experience is considered more important than validating the appropriateness of the claims. Trade-offs between the four north stars are rarely explicit. More often, they are driven by habit, personal relationships, or managerial seniority.
Governance can be equally rigid. Decision rights sit with functional heads, while analytics teams provide recommendations but rarely execute. This keeps accountability clear but also slows reaction time. The result is a reactive posture, solving today’s problems instead of engineering them out of tomorrow’s system.
In traditional supply chains, a procurement head might control supplier selection while logistics owns routing decisions and finance governs spending approvals. Each gate slows the process but keeps authority clear. ICAs, by contrast, make authority more situational. Instead of each function optimizing for itself, ICAs create a shared environment where the four objectives are coded into the fabric of the system.
Trade-offs that once lurked in the background become explicit. Every choice can be tested against the same criteria. Which option sustains service without overspending? Which protects margins without starving growth? Which keeps working capital lean without leaving shelves bare?
Decision rights become more fluid. AI agents take on low-risk, high-speed actions where data is clean and consequences containable. Humans stay firmly in the loop for the complex calls, where context, creativity, or strategic nuance matter most. The result is a partnership: machines for speed, people for judgment.
And because every decision generates a trace, feedback loops tighten. Performance data feeds back into the system, models refine, playbooks update. The architecture learns from market shifts, supplier behaviour, and customer response so that each choice, however small, improves the one that follows.
ICAs comes to life through AI agents specialised with sharply defined tasks.
The financial effects compound quickly. Automating compliance checks and vendor onboarding can generate 1–2% additional spend savings. Smarter stock positioning reduces carrying costs while protecting against shortages. Flexible supplier switching cushions against price spikes or capacity gaps.
For decades, supply chains have been defined by reaction. Firefighting became the default operating model. With ICAs in place, the role of leaders in organisations changes shape. Managers are no longer dragged into every bottleneck. Instead, they work from curated, quantified, context-aware options. Instead of scrambling to plug gaps, leaders will rely on decision environments that anticipate, adapt, and optimise continuously. ICAs make this shift possible.
ICAs provide the chassis, and agentic AI provides the engine. Together, they reframe supply chains not as a cycle of emergencies but as a choreography of foresight, putting humans firmly in the driver’s seat.