A group manager at a Fortune 100 company meets with his boss. The conversation goes something like this:
Boss: Has your team developed an AI agent yet?
Group Manager: No, we haven’t started yet.
Boss: And why not?
Group Manager: We’re still waiting for functional requirements.Boss (visibly irate): Don’t you ever give me that bullsh*t excuse again!
This exchange actually happened recently, according to a credible source (he reports directly to the group manager).
Not long after, the team added an AI wrapper to an application that nobody wants or needs — just to say they were “doing AI.”
So, what’s the real state of AI in corporate America?
The anecdote above is just one data point. But given that this company is a leader in its industry, I’d bet this is playing out at countless other organizations — AI initiatives driven by FOMO (“I saw in The Wall Street Journal that our competitor has deployed AI agents…”) or solutions in search of problems.
If you read vendor press releases and marketing materials — and I read a lot of them — you might get the impression that if you’re not deploying AI agents right now, across your supply chain and logistics operations, you’re already being left behind.
However, as McKinsey & Company reported last November in “The state of AI in 2025: Agents, innovation, and transformation” — based on survey responses from 1,993 participants in 105 nations — “While AI tools are now commonplace, most organizations have not yet embedded them deeply enough into their workflows and processes to realize material enterprise-level benefits.”
Or as Belle Lin reported in a February 2026 Wall Street Journal article titled, “AI Agents Are Everywhere…and Nowhere”:
“Businesses don’t necessarily trust them, and haven’t yet started using the technology in a widespread way.”
Lin added that at the WSJ CIO Network Summit in February, 61% of attendees said they were experimenting with AI agents, while 21% said they were not using them at all — with reliability cited as the top concern.
The bottom line: there’s far less reason for FOMO than the headlines suggest, especially when it comes to agentic AI.
In many cases, what companies are “missing out on” is spending time, money, and resources on rushed AI initiatives that never deliver meaningful business value — often driven by vague mandates like, “We need to increase our use of AI by 35% this quarter.”
“While many sectors are still experimenting with artificial intelligence, the tech industry has moved to the next phase: tracking their workers’ use of AI tools — and enforcing it if they have to,” according to a February 2026 Wall Street Journal article. It won’t be long until this becomes commonplace across other industries too.
Here’s my recommendation: forget about AI — at least for a moment.
Instead, discuss the following questions with your team — the questions that should have been discussed in the meeting with the Group Manager and his Boss:
- Which supply chain metrics do we need to improve in the next 6 months? In many cases, you have to answer a different question first: Do we have the right metrics in place, and are they measurable?
- What are the main hurdles to improving these metrics? The answer usually includes a mix of constraints or deficiencies related to resources, technology, and data. A lack of support from upper management and external partners often plays a role too.
- Are we fully leveraging the capabilities of the supply chain applications we already have in place? The answer is almost always no. You may already have access to the capabilities you need in your TMS, WMS, SCP, and other applications and don’t even know it because those capabilities weren’t a priority or on your requirements list when you first implemented the solution.
- How can logistics service providers or other external partners help us overcome the hurdles we face to improve our supply chain metrics? These partners can often help you close the gaps you have in people, technology, data, and know-how faster and more cost-effectively than doing it internally.
- Do we have the data quality, timeliness, and integration required to support better decision-making — with or without AI?
When I say “forget AI,” I don’t mean ignore it. No doubt, AI will transform how businesses operate and how we work in the years ahead. What I mean is don’t become hyper-fixated on the label.
AI is just technology — and as history has shown time and again, it’s not a silver bullet. Implemented poorly or unnecessarily, it doesn’t solve problems — it amplifies them.
