Effective Use Cases of Agentic AI in Demand Forecasting Operations

In 2017 I presented a vision for AI adoption in demand planning in my book The Funda- mentals of Demand Forecasting, whereby the Demand Planner of the future would be responsible for managing mul- tiple AI systems. In this article, I revisit the applications of AI that I predicted then, and assess their viability of them now in light of recent developments and use cases. Of the five applications I outlined, I highlight the effectiveness of three agentic approaches that seem likely to add value to an organization, namely validating manual forecast overrides, explaining demand variability, and automatically gathering information affecting the demand plan. I also reveal which potential applications of AI are more difficult to implement and less likely to yield tangible ...