Whenever I find myself in a conversation about artificial intelligence, I get blown away. It’s amazing how fast the technology moves, how what you knew about its capabilities are rendered outdated almost immediately. It’s also shocking thinking about its potential impact on people who, for one reason or another, are not able to keep up with it. Imagine all the displacement, with little to catch them in the short- to medium-term.
Almost every week I hear a story of how peers and colleagues have used platforms like Claude to crunch massive amounts of data in even shorter times, or pull up information from deep within the organization in the middle of the night, or even to develop new systems and tools – you know the thing they call “vibe coding”? Just a few days ago I heard of the phenomenon of people walking around with their laptops slightly open, so the AI agents they employ can continue to do work while they go about and, I don’t know, “be present” to their families.
Also almost every week – okay, perhaps every two weeks – I hear of companies making a pivot towards more AI, to the detriment of the livelihoods of many people. The story of shoe brand Allbirds transforming itself overnight into an AI company is the most absurd. But I see global firms embrace the technology in the name of greater productivity and greater profits, and that means layoffs in the thousands.
I’m not a Luddite when it comes to AI. I’m not the guy who’ll say something like “I will not use AI at all costs” and condemn those who even just flirt with it. It’s not going to be my personality trait, is all I’m saying. I am curious, from my position within the supply chain sector, how it can better analyze routes and demand levels, help design supply chain networks, and ultimately reduce costs.
But I also have my feet firmly planted in the world of the “creative”. I studied communications. I aspired to be a journalist when I was young. My current position, arguably, is a good compromise, but I have not lost sight of how AI threatens the way of life of so many people – not just people who write and draw and paint and shoot and create music for a living, but, as is clear to me, those who are just getting started on the career ladder, those looking to learn more about their chosen profession. AI could shut that pipeline completely, come to think of it. Everyone enters a specialist, an expert – but where will they learn all that?
I know I am hardly in a position to make sense of all these changes quickly. I have to do more reading, and I intend to return to these themes in the future. For now, though, I recall a conversation about how AI would affect the entry-level office worker in the supply chain sector. If you’re working on the warehouse floor, doing the brunt work of transportation and storage, you’re safe (for now), but if you’re analyzing the data and crunching the numbers, then you could be replaced easily. In the Philippines, the usual digital barriers might be buying us time, but who knows?
It’s a shameful paradox, come to think of it. In my decade working with this industry I have come to understand that supply chain goes beyond the processes and the numbers, although those are important too. Supply chain is especially about collaboration, of working together with stakeholders that might not necessarily things your way. The neverending task is to find common goals and work towards them. I doubt that’s something that AI can do – but again, maybe this is old news by the time the column is published – but rather, something that people develop through years of meeting minds and building relationships.
I have been thinking about recent moves by the Commission on Higher Education to overhaul the general education curriculum for colleges. The main proposal is to reduce the number of GE units from 36 to 18, made possible by removing subjects such as history, art and the humanities, and focusing instead on classes that can build skills that will make students employable. The plans have been shelved, for now, after negative reaction from various stakeholder groups.
Now, I am writing a supply chain column, and I am not intimate with the politics of education policy. But can you imagine our curriculum shifting towards giving students employable skills – while, at the same time, those skills are being subsumed by ever-faster computers operating in resource-hogging data centers oceans away? When they find themselves no longer employable, what will they end up with? All technique, no imagination?
I studied the histories of media and film. I studied how to write articles, how to investigate leads and how to make sure my message is understood by my audience. Yes, I also made short films, to boot. From all those, I brought to my current job in the supply chain sector the ability to link otherwise unrelated topics to my profession, to enrich my readers’ appreciation of their overall impact. I brought the ability to connect the dots, to show the bigger picture – because in our drive to be the best we, as humans, tend to miss the forest for the trees. It’s these skills that allow me to be the best advocate I can be for an industry that is the lifeblood of our economy.
These are skills that, as supply chain evolves, every supply chain manager needs. If they lose these in the drive to be more “employable” – or not, as technology takes everything over – then did we just, figuratively, shoot ourselves in the foot?
Henrik Batallones is the marketing and communications director of SCMAP, and editor-in-chief of its official publication, Supply Chain Philippines. More information about SCMAP is available at scmap.org.
