A blog post by IBM last week regarding AI and Blockchain technologies and services they offer for predicting and solving supply chain challenges sounds promising and also highlights technology’s limitations in solving complex issues if there’s an absence of human agreement and cooperation.

IBM’s blog post describes the benefits of AI’s ability to provide predictive capabilities to companies seeking to avoid supply chain “blind spots” that could lead disruption of supply of essential goods and materials that are key to the companies’ businesses. IBM’s depth of ability in the AI space has been proven time and again, which leaves us with little doubt that its AI offerings, based on available system data, can provide managers with the ability to improve supply chain outcomes that would have occurred in the absence of AI.

The post then also discussed IBM’s multi-enterprise offerings, which sound even more promising, as one can envision the supply chain being integrated, and perhaps more importantly, transparent, from beginning to end. Much of this transparency would come from Blockchain technologies that are growing in popularity and provide mostly open transactions and transparency to those permitted and willing to participate in the chain.

The power of Blockchain’s openness and transparency, not to mention its presumed immutability once transactions have been recorded in the chain, combined with the predictive power of AI, has the potential to be revolutionary. There is a major caveat, though: in some cases, not all players in the chain, whether we’re talking supply chain or block chain, want to have complete transparency. The desire for a lack of transparency can stem from many factors, but suffice to say that if not all players in the chain are willing and able to have complete transparency, much of the potential power of combining AI and Blockchain technologies is lost.

Most people are hopeful that the power of such technology combinations can be realized, but we have to look no further than recent headlines regarding supply chain disruptions due to Covid-19 to understand that such combinations are no panacea. There are many economic and political factors that sometimes trump the desire for openness and transparency. As long as those factors are seen as more important than the promise and payoff of transparency, the potential benefits of combinations of powerful technologies such as AI and Blockchain, for certain industries, at least, in many will continue to offer mostly future potential.

Image by Julius Silver from Pixabay