Two major economic stories from this past year: the tariffs that the Trump administration has placed on countries and products the world over, and the artificial intelligence boom (or maybe bubble).
For some businesses, however, these two major stories are intersecting. Some businesses that are investing in AI and implementing it may be getting a little bit of help cushioning the blow from tariffs, at least for now. There’s more on this in a new supply chain risk and resilience survey from McKinsey.
Mihir Mysore, a partner at McKinsey, recently spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour for more. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Sabri Ben-Achour: Tariffs have touched companies across this economy. They’re also kind of the first economic crisis to come along since the dawn of AI. Has AI come to the rescue at all? And how?
Mihir Mysore: For a company that’s trying to manage tariffs, the first issue they bump up against is detail around data, in the sense of, what are the individual components that I’m importing? How much exactly are the tariffs that I’m paying when I import? When that detail isn’t readily available, AI can be helpful in imputing what that data likely could be. We have also seen it being used to accelerate workflows and automation, because the amount of actual workload associated with tariffs has grown so much. So in that sense, yes, it has come to the rescue.
Ben-Achour: McKinsey’s research suggests that the resilience that companies are building by turning to AI to manage their supply chains and tariffs, in its current form, it’s a shallow kind of resilience. What does that mean? Why do you say that?
Mysore: What they mean is that it’s still limited usage compared to the potential of what you can do with these powerful tools on NTR mapping and transparency. There’s also limited use of tools that are related to what you would call “an early warning system,” or being able to predict a potential disruption based on the early signals that you see. There is lot of potential to use AI use machine learning to improve companies’ ability to detect, respond, and recover from these kinds of disruptions.
Ben-Achour: In the world of supply chain management, in the world of tariffs, in the world of companies’ logistics, is it helping or is it replacing?
Mysore: What we are seeing is that, by and large, it is absolutely helping. There is such a dire need for skilled supply chain professionals that understand the nature of flows across industries. And also, what is really important to a lot of companies is trust. It will be a very long time before a trust in the outcomes of that AI agent is actually established. And until that happens, having the right human in the loop, having the right individual supply chain analyst that knows AI, that understands how to navigate tariffs — there is an incredibly high demand for folks with those skills and capabilities.
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