Naren Agrawal, Professor @ Santa Clara University

Topic: Building Agility and Resilience by Leveraging Machine Learning and AI for Supply Chain Planning

Abstract: Supply chain excellence is a core element of a firm’s competitive strategy.  While supply chain agility is widely acknowledged by managers as a key requirement, experiences during the global pandemic and with other recent geopolitical events have cemented the importance of supply chain resilience as well. Unfortunately, many companies have failed to develop strategies that can deliver agility and resilience. In particular, the most promising enablers of these capabilities, i.e., artificial intelligence and machine learning, cloud computing, and big data, have fallen short of their promise. A key challenge for executives, therefore, is how to leverage these capabilities in their supply chain planning process to achieve resilient and agile supply chains.

In this talk, we describe Optimal Machine Learning (OML), a new paradigm that we have developed, that leverages the capabilities of advanced technologies to overcome these challenges.  We describe how OML can be used to optimize the use of available data to generate resource allocation decisions.  We illustrate the power of this new approach for supply chain planning by reporting on successful implementations in complex global supply chain environments. We then discuss how the OML framework, combined with the use of LLMs, can be used to guide efforts to design effective strategies for supply chain resilience and agility that mitigate geopolitical risks through application of detailed scenario planning.

Vincent Quenneville-Bélair, Senior Applied Scientist @ Amazon

Topic: Toward Forecasting Foundation Model at SCOT

Abstract: Today, SCOT's forecasting models draw on advances from across machine learning—deep learning, image recognition, and natural-language processing—to make accurate predictions across the full range of product categories. This unified model isn't the result of a single breakthrough. It reflects over a decade of iteration, scale, and ambition -- a journey shaped by practical challenges and evolving ideas. In this talk, I'll share how that journey has brought us to the idea of a forecasting foundation model -- what it means, why it matters, and how we’re moving toward it.