If a 19th-century king were to step into a high street supermarket today. The man whose court marveled at banquets overflowing with exotic fruits and flavors would be stunned, not by opulence, but by abundance. The quiet miracle behind today’s supermarket aisles is a supply chain system that has grown more sophisticated, more interconnected, and more resilient than ever before.

And today, we stand at the threshold of its next leap: the rise of artificial intelligence. Yet as AI accelerates this transformation, one conviction guides our thinking at Danone: progress will only be meaningful if people remain in the front and center.

We also strongly believe that the fundamentals of supply chain excellence cannot be substituted. AI builds upon these fundamentals in many ways, such as speeding up decision support, expanding system impact, connecting disparate systems, but it cannot replace fundamental excellence. A badly maintained manufacturing line will not become better by putting AI enabled controls on it. 

Since the nineteenth century, the global supply chain has evolved into a vast, interconnected ecosystem, its complexity deepening as globalization expanded. These networks have weathered years of turbulence - climate shocks, a global pandemic and more - and still proven resilient.

What is changing now is an ever-increasing number of data points which need to be managed as supply chains become more vast and more agile. Delivering to a customer’s shelf is far more complex than to their warehouse. And this needs processing power.

The next chapter will be driven by reinvention. The potential impact of AI is already clear: smarter operations, faster choices, and at the end, more personalized products and better service for consumers.

The question is no longer what AI can do for supply chains, but what AI will do to them.

With AI’s rise come challenges, and opportunities. A recent World Economic Forum report shows that 41% of companies plan to adjust their workforce by 2030 due to AI. At the same time, 170 million new jobs are predicted to emerge globally as a result of this transformation.

What this tells us is simple: AI may change work, but human capability will determine the value we unlock from AI. Technology does not diminish the importance of people; it magnifies it and elevates it. This has been the history of human elevation through the five industrial revolutions we have lived through since the steam engine was invented.

At Danone, our ambition is clear: to build an anti‑fragile supply chain, one that thrives by managing uncertainty. A system which performs better than any competitor in the face of adversity.

AI can play a role to accelerate this, but only if we equip people to use it. AI models must be trained; for that to happen effectively, humans must be trained. This human‑in‑the‑loop approach is not optional. It is the future of responsible, resilient, scalable operations.

And this requires more than tools. It requires leadership, a mindset shift, and the conviction that human expertise remains our most strategic asset, even - and especially - in an AI‑driven world.

Most organizations develop AI centrally and deploy it outwards. At Danone, we are taking a different course: the democratization of AI applications. In practice, that means empowering frontline teams to help design and shape the very solutions they will use. The success of this model, and the value it creates, depends on significant workforce training and upskilling, ensuring humans and machines work together in synergy.

This is why we have accelerated major initiatives. We have deployed an end‑to‑end real‑time and event‑driven digital ecosystem connecting equipment and digital applications across the supply chain, enabling our teams to harness the advanced analytics and tangible benefits for consumers unlocked by AI. And most recently, we opened the leading-edge industry initiative called Industry 5.0 Academy, a global training hub that will empower more than 20,000 frontline manufacturing employees to work confidently with advanced technologies.

This is how you scale transformation: not by relying on a few experts, but by enabling thousands of experts to emerge.

Technology will continue to evolve rapidly. Investments will grow: in 2024 alone, Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon invested a combined $125 billion in AI data centres to support the next generation of advanced capabilities.

Ultimately, resilience depends on how fast companies adapt. Across Danone’s supply chain, technology strengthens our agility, but only when paired with investment in people - their skills, creativity and local expertise. AI is only as powerful as those empowered to deploy it.

If the 19th-century King had been astonished by the abundance of a modern supermarket, imagine his reaction speaking to an AI agent designed by one of our frontline technicians!

And at Danone, we’re continuing to accelerate – realising the potential of AI by putting people at the heart of everything we do.