Supply Chain Superintelligence
Talk to My Agent: Where Supplier Risk Management Goes from Here
"I think that the agents will save us. I'm very excited about realising that, because I think it's one of the most exciting times in the industry… ever." Risk teams can see further into their supply chains than ever before. So why does it still take weeks to do anything about what they find? Ahead of Prewave Day on 7 October, host Thomas George sits down with Harald Nitschinger , Co-founder and CEO of Prewave, and they start with a serious topic: the old way of managing supplier risk has stopped working. The post-Covid years broke the known model of supplier risk management, on both the risk side and the technology side: export controls, sanctions, and supply chains used as bargaining chips on the geopolitical board. These do not behave like the risks we once knew. For a decade, supplier risk management solutions framed the problem as not being able to see into the supply chain. That problem has largely been solved, and the result is tens of thousands of multi-tier suppliers and hundreds of alerts a month. Visibility, Harald argues, is now the foundation rather than the solution: the haystack is the easy part, and finding the needle is the work. Agentic AI is the key to changing where a team’s time actually goes. The gap between alert and actions is not an information problem but a context problem: which parts come from the affected suppliers, what inventory sits behind them, which lines are running them right now, how long requalification would take. That information exists, but it sits in different systems and different departments. That’s where the agents come in: taking on a large share of the work procurement and supply chain teams do today, but with one hard condition. Context. Procurement's context sits in ERP systems, material master data, inventory records, and in the heads of the most senior buyers in the building. Customers who spent years consolidating that into a data lake are in pole position. Customers running forty disconnected ERP systems are not, and an agent will struggle there for exactly the same reasons a human does. Key insights: Geopolitical risk persists and evolves rather than resolving, which breaks the one-alert-per-event model Visibility is a necessary foundation, not a solution; producing the haystack is easier than finding the needle The gap between signal and action is caused by mapping external risk onto internal context, not by slow detection Rebalancing resilience investment across the portfolio can raise resilience while lowering total spend About Harald Nitschinger Harald Nitschinger is Co-founder and CEO of Prewave. Since founding the company in 2017, he has led its development from AI-driven media monitoring into a full supply chain risk platform used by many of the world's largest manufacturers. About Thomas George Thomas George, host of the Supply Chain Superintelligence Podcast , is Prewave's Lead Risk Editor and co-author of The Taiwan Complex, Magnetic West, and many more. His focus on the intersection of geopolitics, supply chains, and strategic risk brings niche supply chain topics to the public eye. Resources & Links Visit Prewave: https://www.prewave.com/ Don't Miss Out Follow the Supply Chain Superintelligence Podcast for more expert conversations on geopolitics, resilience, and the forces shaping the future of global supply chains.
