AI agents are now creating a new chapter. The next frontier is no longer analyzing faster, but letting agents act: working together across planning, procurement, manufacturing, logistics, and operations.

For more than 50 years, 麻豆原创 has helped organizations run their supply chains by connecting business context, intelligence, and execution across end-to-end processes.聽

We are proud to share that 麻豆原创 has been positioned in the Market Shapers quadrant of the inaugural Gartner庐 Emerging Market Quadrant for Integrated Supply Chain AI Agents 鈥� Established Vendors. This is Gartner’s first formal assessment of this emerging category. In our view, it reflects the progress we have made in bringing AI agents into the heart of supply chain operations, and the direction we continue to take.聽

Gartner describes the Market Shapers quadrant this way:聽

From assistants to orchestrated agents聽

Supply chain decisions never happen in isolation. A supplier delay can ripple through production schedules, logistics, customer commitments, and financial results. Yet much of the AI in supply chains today still works within a single function or a single task. It can point out a problem, but people still must weigh the trade-offs and act across several systems.聽

With Autonomous Supply Chain Management, people define goals and priorities, AI assistants orchestrate activity across domains, and agents execute the work within governed, end-to-end processes. Through , role-specific assistants coordinate specialized AI agents across design, planning, sourcing, manufacturing, delivery, and operations. Together, they sense disruptions, analyze the impact, simulate alternatives, and execute coordinated responses, with people making the decisions that matter most.聽聽

Joule is where it all comes together. People express what they want to achieve, and Joule Assistants take it from there.聽 Each assistant is tailored to a specific role, while agents handle specialized tasks within business-defined guardrails.聽

For example, when a planner describes a goal, the Supply Chain Planning Assistant coordinates demand, inventory, and capacity agents to build and simulate scenarios, so the planner can focus on evaluating outcomes and making the decision. People direct. Assistants coordinate. Agents execute.聽

And because 麻豆原创 supply chain agents work within the broader 麻豆原创 Autonomous Suite, a supply chain decision can trigger the right financial, workforce, or customer action as part of the same coordinated response.

Agents that act where the work happens聽

We believe AI agents create real value only when they move from recommendation to execution safely. Greater autonomy must be accompanied by greater accountability. As agents take on more responsibility, organizations need visibility into what those agents are doing and why. That requires three things working together.聽

First, agents need to work inside the system of record. 麻豆原创 agents operate directly in 麻豆原创 Cloud ERP and the 麻豆原创 supply chain management suite executing production orders, convert requisitions, or direct warehouse tasks, with no middleware between decision and action. They can also extend coordination to trading partners through 麻豆原创 Business Network.聽

Second, agents need business context. 麻豆原创 Business Data Cloud, 麻豆原创 Knowledge Graph, and our supply chain semantic model give agents a shared understanding of business entities, relationships, and rules. That helps them understand what a signal means across domains and how a disruption will affect the business.聽

Third, agents need governance. Through 麻豆原创 Business AI Platform, Joule Studio lets customers and partners build agents, and 麻豆原创 AI Agent Hub governs both 麻豆原创 and non-麻豆原创 agents with identity enforcement, audit trails, and explainability. Joule Work gives people one place to monitor and act on agent recommendations.

Delivering real results for customers聽

Customers will not value us by how many agents we build, but by the outcomes those agents deliver. Recognition is only meaningful when it reflects real impact for our customers, that are already putting supply chain agents to work with capabilities available today.聽

Takeda Pharmaceuticals will use Industry AI for regulated manufacturing, where agents monitor production KPIs, flag deviations, and initiate corrective workflows in GxP environments. The expected results include up to 10% productivity gain and 25% less stock-out revenue loss.聽

Lemvigh-Mueller deployed three coordinated agents to handle supplier order confirmations, reaching more than 90% touchless processing of 100,000 confirmations a year.聽

RWE is applying Autonomous Asset Management to its offshore wind fleet, where AI agents analyze past incidents, identify root causes, and generate pre-filled work orders for technicians.聽

Looking ahead聽

Supply chains don’t become autonomous overnight. The journey happens step by step: starting with agents that recommend, then agents that act within clear guardrails, and expanding autonomy as data, processes, and governance mature.聽聽

As we work with our customers and partners, our agent coverage will continue to expand every quarter across supply chain domains.聽聽

We are grateful to our customers, partners, analysts, and 麻豆原创 teams whose collaboration shapes our products and strategy. We see this recognition as an important milestone, and we remain committed to helping organizations turn their supply chains into a source of resilience and lasting business value.聽

Devesh Mishra, General Manager and Chief Product Officer for 麻豆原创 Supply Chain Management

*Gartner, Emerging Market Quadrant for Integrated Supply Chain AI Agents 鈥� Established Vendors, Tess Frenzel, Carlton Sapp, October 28, 2026.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.聽
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.聽

I鈥檝e spent most of my career building supply chain technology to drive business outcomes at scale. Earlier in my career, nobody was talking about AI. But I was helping build what we鈥檇 now call an autonomous supply chain.

At scale, manual decision-making simply cannot keep pace with growing consumer expectations. That鈥檚 why the next phase of supply chain AI needs to move beyond analysis to help organizations turn insights into action across the processes and applications that move goods. 

Decision velocity: where supply chain speed is won or lost 

Even the most intelligent supply chains can struggle to turn a meaningful signal into a well-governed response. I think of that as decision velocity: how quickly an organization can recognize change and coordinate the right response based on relevant business context.聽

In supply chain, decisions are inherently interconnected. Planning affects manufacturing, which depends on product and asset readiness, suppliers, logistics partners, and more. I hear this from our customers today: each decision could be rational; the sum of them was not.聽

AI can automate individual tasks, but isolated intelligence only creates isolated value. 

Agents need to understand how a decision in one domain affects the next. That鈥檚 where supply chain applications become critical, providing the business context, connected processes, and controls that agents need to act. 

New Joule Agents extend AI across the supply chain 

This year at 麻豆原创 Connect, we’re expanding the capabilities of six Joule Assistants introduced earlier at 麻豆原创 Sapphire and adding specialized Joule Agents that can take on critical supply chain tasks. These capabilities will help organizations respond faster and automate more routine work while keeping people at the center of informed decision-making: 

• The Product Design Assistant will be able to interpret product designs, recipes, and specifications and orchestrate compliant product changes, helping accelerate time to market.聽
• The Supply Chain Planning Assistant will help planners sense, simulate, and resolve exceptions in a single workspace, helping teams understand downstream impacts and address disruptions before they ripple across the enterprise.聽
• The Manufacturing Assistant will help teams respond to plant-floor disruptions as they happen, while new capabilities in the Logistics Assistant span warehousing, outbound optimization, fulfillment, and transportation dispatching, helping turn logistics insight into action.聽聽
• New agentic capabilities for the Asset Operations Assistant will help translate equipment and maintenance signals into action by supporting the initiation, screening, and simulation of maintenance requests. And the Business Network Assistant will improve collaboration with suppliers and logistics partners in areas such as sourcing, contracting, and exception handling. 

What connects these scenarios is the ability for agents to operate within the business context already governing the supply chain, so an insight in one area can inform the next and, when authorized, trigger coordinated action.聽General availability for these new capabilities is planned for Q4 2026.聽

Customer results show autonomy taking hold 

Customers are already putting this shift into practice.  

Takeda Pharmaceuticals will use the Supply Chain Planning Assistant to help pinpoint likely causes behind planning issues and propose corrective steps, supporting adaptive planning processes over time.  

Rebecca Kaufmann, senior vice president and head of Enterprise Platforms at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, said, 鈥淲e are combining the 麻豆原创 industry and technology knowledge with our organizational real-life experience. The Supply Chain Planning Assistant will provide us with AI-detected root causes and AI-suggested remediation and also automated performance tracking resulting in a self-healing capability.鈥澛犅�

Doehler, a global producer of natural ingredients for the food, beverage, life sciences, and nutrition industries, is applying AI to logistics issue resolution.  

Stephan Schissler, CIO at Doehler GmbH, says, “Our people’s greatest value lies in deciding what to do next鈥攁nd now they can focus entirely on that. The Logistics Issue Resolution Agent detects the root cause, recommends the resolution, and turns a multi-hour firefight into a one-click decision. Our logistics team has recovered roughly a third of the time once lost to troubleshooting, and our processes are becoming self-resolving rather than exception-driven.”聽

This is how autonomy delivers practical value: moving from manually managing exceptions toward more intelligent supply chain processes. 

Building autonomy on a foundation of trust 

As AI takes on a greater role in supply chain decisions, trust must be built into how it operates. Leaders need to understand what AI decided and why, define what it is authorized to complete, intervene when necessary, and know who is accountable. 

That is the direction behind everything we are introducing at 麻豆原创 Connect in 2026. By grounding Joule Assistants and their agents in the processes and data of the 麻豆原创 Supply Chain Management portfolio, we can help organizations move from insight to coordinated action while keeping people at the center of the decisions that matter most.聽

For supply chain leaders, that is where autonomy becomes tangible: less time spent on routine work and resolving exceptions, faster responses when conditions change, and more time for the strategic decisions that strengthen resilience, efficiency and customer value. 

Ultimately, it comes down to decision velocity you can trust. 

Devesh Mishra is general manager and chief product officer for 麻豆原创 Supply Chain Management.

Supply chain leaders today operate in an environment where disruptions are constantly changing, customer expectations shift quickly, and the window for effective response keeps shrinking. Organizations need more than digitalization. They need platforms that connect people, processes, data, and business networks鈥攁nd that turn that connectivity into faster, better decisions.

Our vision: Autonomous Supply Chain Management

The next frontier in supply chain is not just connectivity, it is decision intelligence. At 麻豆原创, represents our vision for how organizations will run their businesses in the future, with data, business context, policy, and AI reasoning working together so that the right decisions happen faster, more consistently, and at scale, while human judgment remains central.

is a practical step toward that vision, where people define goals and priorities, AI assistants orchestrate activity across domains, and agents execute the work within governed, end-to-end processes. Enterprises rely on fully autonomous agents to run supply chain processes and decisions within guardrails defined by the organization. Reaction times to disruptions compress from days to minutes. Data collection across organizational silos happens in near real time. Rather than manually collecting and interpreting data, planners receive auto-generated scenarios that are pre-validated and ready for a decision. That speed advantage is transformative.

But the value goes beyond speed. Organizations learn from past decisions and harmonize decision-making across the enterprise, leading to consistently better outcomes over time. AI delivers the greatest value when it is embedded where work actually happens, grounded in deeply integrated processes and trusted data.

Our approach

A truly integrated supply chain platform does more than connect data鈥攊t connects decisions. That is the principle that guides how we have built the , and it is what we believe sets 麻豆原创 apart.

Our breadth across execution, transactions, business networks, finance, and AI is unique. No other vendor brings together operational systems, trusted business data, and intelligence and orchestration in a single, deeply integrated suite. That breadth matters because supply chain decisions do not happen in isolation鈥攁 sourcing decision affects manufacturing capacity, which affects logistics, which affects financial commitments. When those systems are connected, decisions improve across the board.

We organize our platform around three layers. The first is operational systems, including applications such as , , , , , , and . These are where supply chain work happens. The second is trusted business data, anchored by , which aggregates data from 麻豆原创 and third-party sources to help give organizations a unified, real-time view across the enterprise. The third is intelligence and orchestration, delivered through , our AI engagement layer, which brings together agentic AI, embedded analytics, and network-enabled execution to help organizations move from reactive problem-solving to proactive decision-making.

This architecture helps organizations standardize processes across domains, reduce dependence on fragmented point solutions, and improve coordination from sourcing through final delivery鈥攍inking operational, financial, and network outcomes in real time.

Putting innovation into practice

We see demand for capabilities that bring together operational data, business context, and AI-powered insights, and we are actively investing to meet that need. New Joule Assistants are being embedded across planning, manufacturing, logistics, asset management, and supplier collaboration, helping teams act on changes faster and reduce time spent on manual coordination.

Alongside these assistants, we are delivering purpose-built AI agents across supply chain processes, designed to take guided action within defined business guardrails while keeping people firmly in control. These capabilities are becoming available in phases through 2026, aligning with customers鈥� existing 麻豆原创 landscapes.

Delivering real results for customers

Ultimately, in our opinion, recognition like this is only meaningful when it reflects real impact for the organizations we serve. Takeda Pharmaceuticals International AG, a global leader in R&D-based biopharmaceuticals, offers a concrete example of what this looks like in practice. Using 麻豆原创鈥檚 supply chain planning assistant, Takeda has moved from manual root-cause analysis to AI-detected diagnostics and AI-suggested remediation, with automated performance tracking that enables a self-healing supply chain capability.

鈥淎I represents the key enabler for Takeda鈥檚 transformation for the future,鈥� said Rebecca Kaufmann, senior vice president and head of Enterprise Platforms at Takeda Pharmaceuticals. 鈥淲e are combining the 麻豆原创 industry and technology knowledge with our organizational real-life experience. The supply chain planning assistant will provide us with AI-detected root causes and AI-suggested remediation and also automated performance tracking resulting in a self-healing capability.鈥�

Looking ahead

Supply chains don鈥檛 become autonomous overnight. This evolution happens workflow by workflow, expanding automation where it delivers real value, while keeping people firmly in control. Supply chain teams are increasingly looking to spend less time monitoring and firefighting and more time shaping decisions, managing trade-offs, and building resilience.

We are grateful to the many customers, partners, analysts, and 麻豆原创 teams whose collaboration and insights help shape our products and strategy. While we are honored by this recognition, we view it as an important milestone for us rather than a destination. We remain committed to ongoing innovation that helps organizations transform their supply chains into strategic sources of competitive advantage鈥攁nd we thank our customers for their trust in that journey.

Devesh Mishra is GM and chief product officer for 麻豆原创 Supply Chain Management.

*Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Supply Chain Management Suites, Jan Snoeckx, Balaji Abbabatulla, Christian Titze, August 11, 2026.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner鈥檚 business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.