 Hello everyone and welcome to another Digital Supply Chain Institute Insights. This time here with me, it's a privilege and pleasure to have Chris Roder, who is co-founder and the CEO of Grey Market Labs. Chris, welcome. Thank you Marco, glad to be here. So what we will try to unlock today in a bit and give more light into it are the things which are related to what we have been seeing in the last few years that there is a new way of automation for supply chain operations. So on that side, we have heard and seen a lot of conversation about the AI at the moment and the perspectives around it. So how these new tools improve supply chain operations from your point of view and as a company who is dealing with technology? Sure, so I appreciate it. I'd say the first thing around that is with automation and what's happening in the world. We'll take AI out of it for a second and just talk about the general computing world. We've got a chance right now. The world is fundamentally changing, we're in a transition time, coming out of COVID and coming out of everything that we've seen in the past three years. We've got companies that have an opportunity in financial markets and everything else to re-baseline and reset the architectures that we're able to use and put in place. And really they've got, it's almost less than 12 months now of kind of a window where they can take a look at where their architecture and their business sits and make some bets and re-architect and redesign how they approach the supply chain and take advantage of some of these automation tools. So things like while cloud computing has been out for a while, what is pushed is the ubiquity to access to technology. So you can access the services and pieces of information that you need to make supply chain faster to streamline transactions, to have the insights into what's going on. I think that's a big part of what is going on is the observability into what's happening right now. But you have to take that, you have to take a different approach to the architecture that's in place and put in whether you consider micro services or hybrid architecture or it's all services-based where you're plugging in a lot of these different pieces, you need that fundamental point of view from your organization to be successful over the course of this next year. And now, right now is that opportunity for that automation re-baseline. Thank you very much, Chris. And you mentioned a very interesting and important word which people usually neglect and it's about the architecture, right? It's a foundational stone of how you integrate technology. It's not only about the underquote sexiness of technology, but basically the architecture you use. So in that sense, we touched based on the AI and generative AI has been a big buzzword and having the release of chat GPT. Also, he has streamlined a lot of conversations about the operations of supply chain, maybe potentially then the architecture and the AI. So having this trend and your experience with various different clients across the board, how do you see these things interlinked at this stage or do you see them interlinked at all? I think they are absolutely interlinked. And and if anybody tries to separate them, I think that's counter, it's going to be counter productive. So the way I view AI is it's a tremendous tool. And like many other pieces of technology that come out, it's the world is going to start to figure out how to use that tool. And automation, obviously, people talk about the concerns around employment and my job or my position will be automated away, because AI will take it over. Well, that's that is for certain sectors will be something that needs to be taken a look at. I think it's more positive than negative for sure. And in the automation again, around giving access, natural language access to high technology. So what is traditionally been in the world of somebody like myself, where I have gotten my degree around computer science and programming and been deep into this field, that that has given me access to technology that most other people don't have access to or the knowledge of how to implement AI is taking that barrier away. So you're really, if you think about it, what is fundamentally doing is giving programming capability to people in regular normal language. And the ability to do that you that that solves data or gives access to solve really hard data problems. It gives access to really, you could even program full systems and say, I want to build this type of system AI help me do it. And you don't need to have had a degree or a master's or a doctorate in computer science to go do that. You can do that as just an educated person that has learned the AI kind of nuances and language and how to ask questions of the AI. I think that is with what is fundamentally changing is that access to information and access to, to that high tech. And that has to be part of it's, I mean, it's already been forced into being part of our conversation. And it has been for years, but it has to be part of every company's conversation. And how are you going to leverage it? Don't ignore it. Figure out how you're going to leverage it. I like what you said at the end, don't ignore it but learn. And as you rightly shared, there are so many things happening and so many opportunities, but again, on the other side, they are not coming just around the corner or tomorrow. So let's shift gears towards the area where you really are as a company changing things today and hear your views on how you see that the current part of new automation, including as well AI, is basically changing the privacy, security, or transparency of supply chains. Sure. And I think it's really important for supply chain because as we've been, as part of our forums where we all get together as members of the supply chain institute and share challenges and problems, a lot of it is down into, okay, transparency and observed visibility into where things are in the supply chain, timing, and just really getting access to that information. And what we're seeing, the AI will allow more and more of that access, that's a positive, but on the privacy and security side, the more of that information that gets pumped into an artificial intelligence engine of sorts is the more information that is automatically correlated for both positive and potentially negative side effects. So if anybody has access to your AI engine, which that's kind of the root of it, is you have to have more and more people as part of these AIs to make them valuable, the more exposure you might have as an organization. So that's the piece that I think from a security team or a privacy team, chief risk officers have to think about is how do you allow the use of this technology? Some of it might have to be internal and that'll reduce some of the benefits of it. But a lot of it is going to have to be engaging with these external AI engines and computing. And how do you control or at least monitor the information that's going into it so you know what's out there? That's one piece. And then the second piece is, how do you use the AI itself to police what's going on in there? Because I think that's going to be the only way that you can really have privacy and security is using the AI for its own policing mechanism. And don't rely on the AI or open AI in the companies or Microsoft to do it for you. You write the tools and the scripts or you find a trusted third party to write those methods to ask the AI, hey, where's my information? Who has access to my information? Who's trying to access this? This is just the start of that cycle but using the AI to police itself is critical I think for the next generation. Thank you very much, Chris. It's a very fast forward idea in a way of how you phrase it that the AI can basically police itself for you. Which so far I think without this technology nobody was able to do it. It was all about looking inside and then trying to build the things on our own with our teams but now we can ask the technology to do that for itself. So having all these things in mind it's not only that the technology is changing that the opportunities are there but it's as well implicating how we manage. So having that in mind I think the management will become a very important piece of how we unlock these new chains and in that sense what do supply chain leaders from your point of view need to ensure so the new technology can be implemented successfully or in the right way? Right. So it's just like you need access to hybrid technology. You can't just rely on cloud. You can't just rely on internal data centers. You can't just rely on building things from scratch. You really have to use all that hybrid approach to technology. You need a hybrid approach to your management of it. Don't dump it on the CIO of your transportation company and say okay, go do it and then the business runs itself separately. The CIO, the CTO, their engineers, the legal team because I think there's a lot of legal implications that are, I mean in the U.S. at least you've heard the hearings this past week on AI. I mean we're just at the start of that and who knows what regulations will start to come out here in the near future or even over the last five years need to be have those teams working together rather than after the fact when something's happened having that hybrid team brought together, the business units, the technology teams, the legal and risk teams all brought together into one group to, as I said in the very beginning of our call, take advantage of the opportunity now to put in that new architecture. It's not just a technology thing. It's a process. It's a business of where does the supply chain organization need to go in the next five to 10 years and what is that right architecture to get them where they need to go from a business perspective, bringing that hybrid team together to understand how to do it. Not just the problems or challenges around it, but great. How do we work with this? How do we learn from this? How do we bring these new opportunities to this AI, these advanced privacy and security techniques, whether it's zero trust or isolation architectures? How do we bring that to bear to really make us successful for our business in the next five to 10 years? So exciting times are ahead of us and talk about the role of the leaders which will be highly important. What would be your advice for a first step going into this new world of an old? So first step, bring on a good partner. So the supply chain institute is a great, what I found is one of the best forums for collaboration. It's one of the most open forums and trusted places that I've been able to have conversations in the past few years over with trusted partners. So find somebody within that group and make that, you guys have said the constellation, find your constellation, make that constellation. That's what I would say is my suggestion is find those partners. That's where we found success as we is working in the finance field or whether it's been working in the federal space, US federal law enforcement or defense world. When you find the groups of people that are addressing this problem and are like-minded in it of not how they approach it, you want diversity of thought but in the goals that they have. So I think in this digital supply chain institute, we all have the same goal. How do we make supply chain more resilient? How do we make it more successful, more observable and transparent? And I think that would be my first step is, okay, let's engage with this group and you've got a really strong partner there. Thank you very much, Chris. Thank you for ending on the note of strong partnership, diversification of thought and then building your constellation of value to have AI as your partner and new automation technology as your partner, which will benefit everybody in the value chain. So thank you, Chris, for being with us. Thank you all for being active partners and members of Digital Supply Chain Institute Insights and we look forward to seeing you again with the next topic we will cover and share with you.