No, AI Isn’t Coming for Your Demand Planning Job

The increasing adoption of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the demand planning field raises questions as to the role of the Demand Planner going forward and whether humans will still be required in this new environment. In this article I discuss that, despite the value AI/ML bring in terms of analyzing vast amounts of complex data, human input is not only required, but critical to ensuring such tools add value to an organization. I discuss the shortcomings of AI — not understanding cause and effect, seeing patterns where none exist, and lack of common sense and ethics — and how human being are necessary to fill these gaps, making the relationship between man machine more complementary than competitive.