inNOWvate Supply Chain Event 2022 | S&OP | Aera Technology

220,000 decisions
Five years ago, Unilever decided to invest in artificial intelligence in the hope of making better and faster decisions. “It wasn’t so much about automating tasks, but about improving decisions that were often based on emotion and experience. We wanted to make decisions based on data,” explained Olivier Carnet, Executive Vice President of Supply Chain Excellence and Transformation at Unilever. Carnet (pictured right, next to Gonzalo Benedit of Aera Technology) had been invited to share his insights by Aera Technology, the supplier of the artificial intelligence. “We made 220,000 decisions using Aera Technology’s platform in the first four months of this year alone - both big and small decisions, and also decisions that we previously never even made.”
Unilever is using the Aera platform to create skills. “Skills are basically apps that produce recommendations or automated actions, for example related to safety stocks or rescheduling production lines,” explained Carnet. “We have already developed 12 skills and are working on ten more. We want to increase the number of skills fivefold in the next three to five years.”