Why Most Supply Chain Leaders Struggle to Measure AI Investment Returns
Here's a stat that should make every CIO and CSCO squirm in their ergonomic chairs: more than half of chief supply chain officers can't actually tell you what their AI spending returns.
According to a fresh Gartner survey, 55% of CSCOs remain unclear on the ROI of their AI investments — even as 67% of supply chain digital budgets now flow straight into AI. Translation — companies are shoveling cash into the technology while flying blind on whether any of it works.
The "rightsized" change-management pitch
Gartner's argument isn't "buy more AI." It's "stop running AI like a science fair." Senior principal analyst Lorraine Gavin told MHL News that organizations have grown competent at executing change for individual initiatives — but the harder, more important decision today is where to spend limited change-management resources so they actually move business outcomes. The prescription: tie every AI project explicitly to supply-chain strategy and broader enterprise priorities, instead of letting fragmented pilots eat the budget. Gartner predicts that by 2030, companies which "rightsize" their change-management this way will pull roughly twice the AI ROI of those clinging to legacy methodologies.
Trust is the real bottleneck
If you want a second opinion, IDC and Kinaxis surveyed over 2,000 supply-chain leaders across nine markets — and landed on a related but nastier headache. AI adoption is now essentially universal, yet 52% of those leaders say they don't trust the decisions AI makes, and only 12% have AI planning governance fully embedded in operations. Meanwhile 41% expect autonomous supply chains at scale to be their core operating model within one to two years. You don't need to be a cynic to spot the contradiction — that's executives asking machines to run the show while admitting they can't yet audit what the machines are doing. Kinaxis field CTO Justin King frames the fix as "accountability at the decision, not just the policy," and IDC research director Eric Thompson calls the next phase "trusted decisions, measurable value, governed autonomy." Nice slogans — but the gap between the marketing slide and the warehouse floor is where the real money leaks.
What to actually do with this
Both reports point at the same underlying mess: AI is being deployed faster than the organizational plumbing can verify it. If you're spending on supply-chain AI and can't yet articulate the return, the answer isn't a bigger model — it's a clearer link between each AI project, the business outcome it touches, and the governance that makes its decisions auditable. IDC's numbers back this up: 62% of leaders say better data quality and integration would unlock more investment, and 51% are still waiting on a clear ROI story before they commit further. Until those two problems — trust and measurable outcomes — get solved, expect the AI line item to keep growing while the justification for it stays satisfyingly vague.