Empowering Sustainable Supply Chains: AI, Transparency and Real-Time Metrics

Our everyday lives are entirely dependent upon worldwide supply chains to provide access to regions and markets for both consumers and businesses. Living in an increasingly globalized world has dramatically transformed supply chains into dynamic and interconnected networks.

Yet, this has created large inefficiencies within the network, resulting in huge challenges. COVID-19 has exposed the risks and brittleness within today’s complex supply chains. In particular, the over-reliance on centralized vendors as a source of critical products and components leads to inflexibility precisely when that flexibility is needed most. The result is extreme difficulty in determining key metrics and data, such as country of origin, given that a single product could be made of components sourced from various continents. This has created complex value chains where many unethical and unsustainable practices take place that can’t necessarily be tracked and monitored effectively. These include: child labor, unsafe labor conditions, discrimination in work environments and environmental harm.

Additionally, global supply chains are facing external challenges such as natural weather events, geopolitical conflicts and financial challenges. The pandemic has exposed the big myth of supply chain management: that the information used for most planning is accurate. According to the Institute of Shipping Economics and Logistics (ISL), container throughput index, which measures the number of people and goods that pass-through shipping ports daily, declined from 113.3 in January 2020 to 107.7 in May 2020 — a decline of 9.5%. On average, these external disruptions cost businesses $184 million per annum.

Companies are realizing the intrinsic business value of traceability for efficiency, cost savings, and achieving product premiums in the market. Furthermore, the increasing advocacy from customers and legislation from governments is prominent. However, companies must first overcome the mistrust associated with validating claims of product identity and traceability. Without the ability to have a transparent view on a supply chain, business and consumers cannot be fully aware and navigate these unethical practices.

Lack of visibility and flexibility within supply chains is deeply entrenched, resulting in inefficiencies which are largely unavoidable with current solutions. This is due to the IT infrastructure currently used which creates data silos that prevent ready access to critical information when it matters, leading to an inability to make informed and time-critical decisions.

Digitization, when implemented using efficient and cutting-edge tools like Blockchain, AI, and IoT, leads to significant benefits like transparency, predictability, accountability, and traceability, all of which are critical to creating irreversible positive change in global supply chains.

Optimizing Blockchain + AI + ML for Supply Chain

The solution sits within the convergence of AI, IoT and blockchain. These combined technologies provide solutions for greater end-to-end traceability and real-time mitigation in supply chains. Digital supply chains integrated with blockchain and AI solutions provide data management, remove silos with dynamic real-time view of data that helps to gain better visibility internally and across supply chains.

Fetch.ai, in line with COP26 and environmental regulation, is working to provide accurate sustainability data such as product origin, carbon emissions, labor wages and hours, the state, quality and price of the products as well as the date and location of the transaction. Central to this are Fetch.ai’s digital agents, which can be thought of as your digital twins representing and carrying out tasks for you. In this instance, suppliers are represented by Fetch.ai’s agents/digital twins within the supply chain. These agents communicate autonomously with each other to collect sustainability data and enable greater decision-making.

• Digital Agents provide the needed data on supply and value chains, focusing on natural and social capital.
• The sustainability data is then communicated across the supply chain through digital agent communication.
• Blockchain technology provides a distributed time-stamping server, peer-to-peer network and transaction records within supply chains.
• This data, once created, cannot be altered, only read, and visible to stakeholders, resulting in greater transparency and trust.

Our collaboration with LiquidChefs uses Fetch.ai agent technology to create a fully transparent and autonomous supply chain. We are excited to be showcasing our work in collaboration with LiquidChefs at the World Economic Forum in January 2022. Here, we will highlight how our digital agents are able to collect sustainability data across global supply chains.