Gartner: Just 23% of Supply Chain Firms have AI Strategies

Driven by pressures to promote rapid return-on-investment (ROI), Chief Supply Chain Officers (CSCOs) might be compromising the potential for long-term AI transformation in their functions.

A new survey by Gartner, Inc., indicates a mere 23% of supply chain leaders claim to have a formal AI strategy in place within their organisations.

Benjamin Jury, Senior Principal, Research in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice, says: “CSCOs feel pressure to achieve short-term ROI from their AI investments, but they must ensure these quick wins don't create future constraints

“Without a structured approach, organisations risk creating inefficient systems that struggle to scale and adapt to evolving business demands.”

Expectations vs reality

Surveying 120 supply chain leaders who had deployed AI in their companies between December 2024 and January 2025, Gartner’s analysis of the survey data revealed multiple disconnects between AI expectations and the reality on the ground within their supply chain functions. 

Chief among these discrepancies was how investment unfolded in the supply chain function, with most CSCOs admitting they took a “project-by-project” approach to facilitate short term wins, rather than exploring more comprehensive or well-defined long-term approaches to funding and transformational investments. 

Such an unstructured approach to the AI investment poses a significant risk, since CSCOs may lose sight of the forest for the trees: by focusing excessively on short-term returns, senior supply chain leaders potentially undermine the long-term transformative potential of AI and stray from their CEO’s directives on using AI to drive growth.

Benjamin notes the sporadic AI investment approach often results in "franken-systems”, or inefficient, complex and layered architectures that extend the payback period for AI transformations and hinder scalability. 

While appealing, the immediate boosts from short-term ROI frequently lead to less savoury marginal long-term gains and a fragile technical infrastructure.

The survey also indicates that bottom-line metrics loom large for supply chain leaders. 

Gartner’s insights reveal they tend to prioritise factors like efficiency, decision-making speed and cost to analyse the success of their AI investments, ranking these factors above outcomes like innovation or increasing revenue. 

Reading between the lines, this implies that CSCOs currently conceptualise AI primarily as a cost-savings and efficiency tool, rather than a driver of innovation, transformation and fresh business models.

How to balance AI investment in supply chain functions

Supply chain leaders miss opportunities to transform their organisation’s capabilities by foregoing calculated approaches to higher-risk projects with extended payback periods. 

Gartner recommends CSCOs develop an AI investment portfolio balancing short- and long-term priorities, to ensure that investments demonstrate value quickly, but with longevity in mind to allow transformational initiatives to power the future of the company. 

To balance short-term wins and long-term transformational benefits, Gartner recommends the following AI investments strategies for CSCOs:

1. Develop a Formal Supply Chain AI Strategy 

Establish a defined and documented AI strategy that outlines both short- and long-term objectives, what success looks like, and what needs to be done (and by when) to achieve that success.

2. Adopt the Run-Grow-Transform Framework

Build an AI investment portfolio that includes "run," "grow" and "transform" projects to strategically allocate resources and deliver immediate operational efficiencies, as well as mid- to long-term benefits.

• Run Phase: Focus on enhancing operational efficiency and cost optimisation through AI-driven automation and predictive maintenance.
• Grow Phase: Foster cross-functional alignment and enhance decision-making capabilities by integrating AI into key processes, such as sales and operations planning.
• Transform Phase: Make principled bets on AI initiatives that position the supply chain as a strategic partner in business growth, leveraging AI for consumer insights and proactive demand shaping

3. Invest in AI-ready Infrastructure 

Ensure scalability and adaptability to meet evolving business demands, in collaboration with the CIO and other executive leaders.

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