Exciting, Boring but good, and Fluffy: Agentic AI in Supply-Chain Management May 2025 Field Report*

Newsletter
June 25, 2025
*Disclaimer: This newsletter was being created by AI Search and supervised by a human (yet). It does not entitle neither to be exhaustive nor to be too serious.

1. The Exciting Stuff (real traction)

What happened Why it’s a big deal
Blue Yonder launched Cognitive Solutions + Supply-Chain Knowledge Graph at ICON 2025. New agents “see, analyze, decide and act” across planning & execution. (Media Center) First mainstream vendor shipping domain-specific LLM agents backed by a supply-chain KG — closes the loop from data to decision without bespoke integration work.
Manhattan Associates rolled out Agentic AI inside “Manhattan Active” plus the Agent Foundry SDK. (Manhattan) Lets customers mint their own warehouse, labor, and inventory agents; early preview shows 30-40% efficiency gains in test DCs.
Google released A2A protocol and previewed Agentspace + Gemini-powered supply-chain blueprints at Sapphire. (Google Developers Blog), (Google Cloud) Inter-agent interoperability removes vendor lock-in; expect plug-and-play ecosystems by Q4.
Microsoft added multi-agent orchestration to Dynamics 365 & Copilot Studio. (Medium) Spin up collaborating agents for PO matching, emissions classification, and disruption alerts directly from ERP.
AWS opened a $10M research call for Agentic AI in supply-chain scenarios. (Amazon Science) Signals Amazon wants agents embedded deep inside logistics and is funding academic groundwork.
OpenAI’s enterprise agent platform hit public beta (2M paying biz users). (WSJ) Early pilots (Stripe, Box) show agents tackling finance & inventory workflows; supply-chain use-cases land next as reasoning models mature.

2. “Boring but Good” (quiet improvements that will stick)

  • Oracle’s Fusion Cloud Planning kept its Leader slot in Gartner’s MQ — incremental ML tweaks cut MAPE by ~5 %. (Oracle)
  • SAP Sapphire 2025: announced a Maintenance Planner Agent + Quote Optimization Agent, GA in Q4. (SAP)
  • Microsoft’s “Connected Data Chains” reference blueprints — dull blogpost, but finally prescribes a sane data model for agent-ready supply-chains. (Microsoft)
  • Mistral’s new Agents API (not supply-chain specific) gives smaller vendors a lighter weight alternative to OpenAI for task-oriented agents. (SD Times)

These upgrades won’t trend on X, yet they shave latency, improve forecast accuracy, and — crucially — don’t require a change-management fire-drill.

3. 💩 The BS Meter (marketing vapor)

Claim Why it’s fluffy
“AI Agents will revolutionize every supply chain next quarter” – Forbes Tech Council op-ed. (Forbes) Piece never defines KPIs, cites zero live deployments. Classic thought-leader filler.
IBM “Expectations vs Reality” blog: “2025 is the year of the agent.” (IBM) Spends 1,800 words re-explaining what an agent is. No new data, just click-bait futurism.
LinkedIn hot-take “62% of execs think agentic AI is critical.” (LinkedIn) Survey size? Methodology? Missing. Treat as anecdotal sentiment, not evidence.

4. Take-aways

  1. Interoperability is arriving: Google’s A2A + Manhattan’s Agent Foundry hint at a standards war. Bet on open protocols.
  2. Knowledge graphs are back — Blue Yonder proves that agents without contextual KGs are just expensive chatbots.
  3. Follow the money: AWS grants, Microsoft SKU bundling, Oracle renewals — the budget is shifting from PoCs to production.
  4. Hype filter: ask “What’s the closed-loop metric and where’s the live customer?” Anything short of that belongs in the BS bucket.

Meet the Writer

Andreas is an entrepreneur and visionary company founder, developing companies in supply chain management, consulting and tech like J&M, aioneers and now Recall Space.

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