There is fear among policy makers and regular citizens on the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on jobs across a wide swath of job categories and industries.
If a well-known Morgan Stanley analyst is right on his view of the situation, the worrying is quite justified.
As reported this week on CNBC.com, Morgan Stanley analysts led by Ravi Shanker wrote in a research note last month that ““AI may be able to totally (or nearly) remove all human touchpoints in the supply chain including ‘back office’ tasks.”
That’s a pretty scary prediction.
The freight transportation sector is on the cusp of a generational shift driven by new technologies, the most impactful of which will likely be AI, Morgan Stanley added in the research note.
For example, “the bank said it expects several hundred autonomous trucks to begin operations in the U.S. in 2024, reducing the cost-per-mile by 25% to 30%, and eventually eliminating the need for drivers entirely,” CNBC reported, though noting the timescale for this is “beyond three years,” according to Morgan Stanley.
And SCDigest will note that while long-haul trucking will likely move driverless in the not too distant future, shorter hauls and local deliveries, which represent a substantial share of driver jobs today, are likely to stay human-based for some time.
The CNBC report sites many other examples of how AI is or will impact supply chains.
For example, the same Morgan Stanley analysts note the severe supply chain disruptions in years 2020 to 2022.
They then say that “By predicting what could go wrong with a fluid transportation network … before it does, AI/ML systems could … potentially even avoid the disruption scenario entirely.”
Analysts at another Wall Street firm, Jeffries, also recently made some extreme predictions, saying that “A shortage of truck drivers, polar vortexes halting interstate commerce, and a dearth of baby formula on grocery store shelves will be a distant memory with the adoption of generative AI in the trucking & logistics space,” in a June 6th note.
Container shipping giant Maerk’s chief technology and information officer, Navneet Kapoor, is also very bullish on AI.
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 “Over the years, [AI] has progressed from being interesting research projects to more ‘real’ projects within companies … And now, with the advent of generative AI … we have a real pivoting opportunity to take AI mainstream,” Kapoor told CNBC.
He said Maersk is using AI to build what it calls a predictive cargo arrival model to improve scheduled reliability for customers.
Maersk also told CNBC it wants to use AI to recommend solutions when shipping routes are congested, advising on whether goods should be flown or stored instead.
So AI is coming fast and furious in the supply chain. The impact on jobs and society are scary to contemplate.
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