Transcription
[Applause]
I will start with a simple question: To those of you who, when you were a child, wanted to be an astronaut? One, two, three… some? Okay. Who wanted to be a medical doctor? Myself included. Wow, a huge majority. Who wanted to be an artist? Create his own band? Okay. Some wanted to be a doctor, an artist, both. Okay. And now, who wanted to be a supply chain manager? One? Okay, good. It's not… [Music] …one. Why? Because this job, as many others, is not in the front row, clearly. And my job today is to make this job exciting and to show you what supply chain is about.
I will first begin with this picture over there, because supply chain is completely hidden. You are aware of supply chain, and you see supply chain when this is going wrong. So, something is going wrong when this is disrupted. This example over there is when a cargo ship—20,000 containers, so quite a big ship—was completely blocked in the Suez Canal in March 2021. This container ship was blocked for 6 days only—let's say 6 days—leading to 400 ships to be blocked at the end of the canal, and about $1 million in costs per day because of these ships that were blocked. What is the result of that money? For sure, but for us customers, we don't have our product anymore. So, when you are going to Ikea and you don't have what you're looking for, this is not a good weekend. But that's it; that's okay. When you're a doctor, when you are someone that needs to have drugs, that needs to have very important stuff for life—being to preserve the life of someone—this is another story. Supply chain, for instance, is crucial in conflicts, in many places.
So why I'm here today is to try to show you something; to show that supply chain and transport is clearly the hidden engine behind our global economy; an engine that is leading a quite silent but very strong evolution in many ways. And I will start with one that is directly targeting us. I will speak about myself; maybe some of you will think the same. Have you—should I have something on the screen? We will do without. Have you ever been to a shop where you want to buy a t-shirt, or I don't know, sneakers? Myself, now—I don't know if because I'm getting older or something—but I want to know the price of the product, but I want to know also where does it come from, the traceability, the CO2 emissions, or other information that will drive my choice. Okay? And this is more and more the case. This is one part of the revolution; there are many, many others regarding supply chain. There are economical things to take into account, environmental impact for sure. Supply chain and transportation represent a huge part—about 20%—of the global emissions, CO2 emissions on a worldwide basis. So clearly, this is one part that needs to change. We have also geopolitics. We have seen that with COVID, with the fact of having drugs and other products that were made far abroad of our country.
And today, I will focus on one part of all these small changes that make a big revolution for the supply chain: the fact that supply chain is one of the most tech-incentive industries in the world. And I will try to show you that, and I will try to show you how all the changes in technology that we are seeing right now will impact this industry and will impact the global economy. Let's take a journey—a journey in which I want—I need to buy a new laptop for my work. This laptop over there, 90% in this case, has been built in Asia, let's say close to Shanghai. So we have the facility here that is building the laptop. This facility will then put the product in the truck. The truck will go to an airport. The airplane will have the customs, the taxes, all these parts that have been—that need to be connected together. So, to put it in a simple way, for the laptop to go from Shanghai to Polytechnique over there, we need to have dozens of subcontractors, dozens of entities that are connected to each other, exchanging information. And the dream will be to have all this information in a digital way. This is not the case, for sure. You have documents, you have facts, you have emails, you have calls, phone calls—many things that are still very important for the global supply chain and for the goods to arrive at the right destination with all the important [Music] documents.
So what I'm trying to show you is that this industry, that is completely hidden—if something is not going wrong, we don't hear about supply chain; we just receive a text saying, "Okay, you will receive your laptop tomorrow or the next day"—but all this complexity over there is managed by something that we call a control tower, that needs to be connected with all the parts that are over there. And this is where it's starting to be quite interesting from an intellectual point of view, from a technological point of view, and from people who like math. I think some of you here—you have a case where you need to take complex decisions; you have an optimization problem with a lot of constraints, with real-time data, multi-languages, because from Shanghai to Paris you can go through different countries, different currencies, different documents—I mean, many things—and for sure, the different documents. For the one of you that start to work on AI or this new technology—is here. We have something where we can do—we can implement a lot of these new technologies.
Okay, let's start with the LLMs, the new ChatGPT, the famous one that we are hearing everywhere. You have maybe seen yesterday a new announcement from OpenAI: the fact that we can take video, sounds, document, PDF document, HTML document, and everything, depending on the language. You can have the final data; you can put this information in the algorithm, and then it will tell you, "Okay, these shipments need to go from this point to this point at this price, with this estimated time of arrival." The ETA—you put on that forecasting—quite important also to try to see and to try to anticipate when the goods will come—and you add more and more new technology. I put also autonomous transportation. This is something that is undergoing—let's say, even if people want to go further on that—today we don't have still drones that are going everywhere and delivering stuff, but maybe in some years. You clearly see here that you have the field to—if you connected—connected, yes—to the right APIs, the right softwares, the right platforms—you have a field of opportunity that is…
I will have a look and try to say—to take this example over there of this control tower. I will be the supply chain manager, and I will ask my control tower, my AI control tower, to deliver my laptop, or a pallet of laptops, with these constraints: 7-day delivery, with the lowest possible CO2 emissions cost, and with a controlled cost in some number of dollars. I put that to the AI, and then this is where it's starting. The AI can—the AI and the control tower can do many things. First, what you will do: you will ask the facility if the shipment is ready or not, if the pallet is ready, when exactly it would need to be shipped. Then it will request a platform, a transport marketplace. Okay, I need to have a ship; I need to have a plane; I need to have a truck, and he will organize everything. So here, he will organize, for instance, the pre-carriage capacity; will book a truck to go to the facility and then go to the airport. What he will do: they will—he will request airlines companies—Lufthansa, Air France, others—and then we ask, "Okay, what are your offers in terms of shipments, capacities and cargo?" And he will select the new A350 Neo that is producing much less CO2 emissions because of the new engine, at a cost that is constrained, let's say. And then, because the AI is connected to all these providers, it will be able to say, "Okay, I know that the shipment will arrive in Charleroi in exactly 42 hours, so I'm able right now to book a truck at the destination to go from Charleroi to Visé, just close to here, where the warehouse is." And because I know that I will have the truck at this specific time, I will be able also to book a slot at the warehouse. And something that you didn't see here, that I don't talk about, is what is a B100 truck; it's a truck that is not in diesel, but in biodiesel, let's say, where it produces also a lot less CO2 emissions. And at the end, if really we are in a magic world where everything is connected and autonomous drones are existing, the AI will be able to book also the slots directly for the last-mile delivery, and I will be the happy customer to receive my shipment, my laptop, directly to my house, for instance.
So this, for sure, is science fiction for now, but I mean, we are not very far from it. If you imagine a world where everything is interconnected, where APIs, where software, SaaS platforms are working together—which is the case today—if you imagine a common shared language that we start to have between airlines, between different kinds of providers and freight forwarders, you start to have the ability to put the bricks together and to have a supply chain that is smart, that is working together fluently. So this—this is what I wanted to show you today—to show you that something that is completely hidden today, that is the core of the economy, the global economy, is completely changing, and all the changes that we see—from ecological, from geopolitical—can be driven also with the main change that I see, from my point of view, the technological part, where all the AI part, the forecasting, all the tools that we are developing can be put in the common good and for the good of the society in reducing the CO2 emissions while optimizing this old supply chain that we're using on a daily basis. Thank you very much. [Applause]