How to rethink talent when AI executes your supply chain

Gartner predicts that 40% of enterprise applications will include AI agents by the end of 2026. That’s up from less than 5% in 2025. By 2028, they expect 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously. A number that, today, is essentially zero.

Those statistics should change the way supply chain leaders think about hiring. Today, the conversation centers on whether AI can be trusted to make decisions. But that conversation is winding down. Tomorrow’s big question is, why are humans still manually executing work that AI can handle on its own? And the reality is, if AI is doing more of the executing, the talent you hire needs to look very different. The playbook most companies use, recruiting for process knowledge, tool proficiency, and execution speed, was built for a task-based world. That world has a shelf life.

The world of autonomous execution means we need a new definition of “routine.” It used to mean simple, repetitive, low-stakes. In 2026, multi-agent systems will coordinate complex workflows end to end, across entire supply chains, and the tasks they handle won’t feel small. They’ll feel like work that, until recently, required experience and judgment.

AI agents are already investigating delayed shipments around the clock, coordinating with carriers, and updating stakeholders. They’re reading shipping documents, extracting structured data, and creating shipment records. Managing dock appointments across email and portals and phone. They are requesting proof of delivery, running follow-ups, and validating documentation. They are responding to customer inquiries in real time, processing claims, identifying detention and demurrage disputes, assembling evidence, and managing resolution workflows.

These agents don’t operate in isolation, either. One extracts a document, another monitors the shipment it created, a third adjusts the dock appointment based on an updated ETA, and a fourth requests the POD when the shipment arrives. AI handles decisions where the variables are complete and the parameters are clear.

What stays human is everything that requires social capital

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report found that 39% of existing skills will be transformed or become obsolete by 2030. But the skills rising fastest aren’t technical ones. They are those that require creative thinking, resilience, and analytical thinking. For supply chain, at least three human advantages stand apart and are superior to AI.

The first is reading between the lines. It’s understanding what a supplier isn’t saying. It’s detecting when a carrier is being evasive versus cautious. It’s picking up on signals that precede problems before they surface in data. AI can analyze communication patterns all day. A human knows that when your supplier says, “We’re monitoring the situation,” what they mean is “Start looking for alternatives.” That distinction doesn’t live in a dataset.

The second is building trust over time. It’s when a carrier prioritizes your loads during peak season because your relationship manager helped them through a capacity crunch last quarter, not because your AI submitted the most optimized request. It’s when candid conversations identify issues before they escalate. As a result, you get prioritized when things are tight. You hear about problems early, from people who pick up the phone because they know you, not because a system flagged it. That kind of capital accumulates slowly, and only between people.

The third is navigating corporate politics. It’s getting cross-functional alignment inside an organization where not everyone agrees or even likes each other is a distinctly human function. It’s knowing that finance still doesn’t trust Ops because of a project that went sideways two years ago. It’s understanding which stakeholders need to feel heard before they’ll sign off, and which ones just need the numbers. AI can propose an optimal solution. A human knows why the CFO will reject it and how to reframe it so it gets approved.

A lot of current supply chain roles amount to rubber-stamping what AI has already recommended. People review decisions they don’t have time to evaluate. Approve things they didn’t meaningfully assess. Everyone quietly knows this, but org charts haven’t caught up.

Supply chain leaders need to rethink three things.

1. Roles. Stop hiring for tactical execution and start hiring for relationship-building, critical thinking, and organizational savvy.
2. Training. Skills development should center on negotiation, emotional intelligence, and stakeholder management, not tools, which can be taught
3. Decision rights. Be explicit about what AI decides on its own versus what genuinely requires a human. Stop pretending people are reviewing decisions when they’re really clicking “approve.”

The technology is ready. Most organizations haven’t redesigned the work to match.

We’ve moved past debating whether AI can execute supply chain decisions. It can, and it will. The question worth spending time on now is what your people should be great at once the execution layer is handled. Most companies haven’t answered that yet. Some haven’t started asking. But the org charts we’re hiring into today will look very different in two years, and the roles that survive will be the ones where a human is doing something AI genuinely can’t.

About the author

Amanda Dyson is VP of marketing at FourKites. She has more than 20 years of experience leading go-to-market strategy, demand generation, and brand growth for enterprise AI, supply chain, and ERP software companies, and has led regional and global marketing teams across a range of high-growth SaaS organizations.

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