Humans have been imagining the future in a variety of ways for quite some time now. We’ve dreamed everything up, from flying cars to funky clothes to space travel. Another trope is artificial intelligence (AI). For centuries, we’ve imagined coexisting with independently functional machines, automatons, and robots. Published more than 130 years ago, The Adventures of Pinocchio places sentience and mischief into a wooden marionette boy. Robotic characters have appeared in film and television since their inception. Flash Gordon had its mechanized robot guards. Lost In Space had its Robot. Soon, dreams turned to nightmares as the AI of our imagination became too smart for its own good, from 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s iconic Terminator. More recently, AI finally caught on with the mainstream in the form of Apple’s disembodied Siri voice assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana. Hollywood quickly dreamed up a new AI-gone-wrong scenario with the Samantha AI from the 2013 film Her.

Fantasy aside, AI today is very much real and far from traveling back in time to terminate Sarah Conner. And rather than taking the form of a robot servant or your spaceship’s sassy computer, Industry 4.0 smart manufacturing AI is pushing supply chain management forward. This is no fluke — the number of AI projects in supply chain processes are expected to double in the next five years, with worldwide revenues for the AI market expected to exceed $500 billion by 2024. But how does AI specifically help companies overcome their supply chain obstacles?

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