If You Don’t Have the Basics, AI Can’t Save Your Supply Chain

One of the things I look forward to most at ketteQuest, our annual supply chain innovation conference, is the chance to have real, engaging conversations with our customers, partners, and executive advisory board members. During ketteQuest 2026, that included a great conversation with Frank Borovsky, principal of B2Beyond and a member of ketteQ’s Executive Advisory Board.  

What struck me most in our conversation is his refusal to let AI hype get ahead of the fundamentals: as Frank put it, if you don’t have the basics down, AI can’t solve anything. We talked about what’s missing when AI lacks supply chain context, and why he believes resiliency, not just a forecast, is the real prize.

Q: Tell us about B2Beyond and the work you do.

A: I’m the principal at B2Beyond, a digital transformation consulting firm working with manufacturers and commercial services companies. If you make a product or roll a truck with a technician, we can help. The fundamental issue with most manufacturers right now is they don’t have the basics down. I was at the Gartner conference recently, and as a practitioner myself a decade ago, I heard the same conversations about supply chain fundamentals we were having ten years ago. What’s changed is that everyone now thinks AI can solve everything. If you don’t have the basics, AI can’t solve anything.

Q: There’s a lot of excitement right now about AI and agents. What’s missing if AI doesn’t have supply chain context?

A: Quite a bit, starting with the people side. A lot of practitioners haven’t gone through the training to understand what good supply chain planning looks like. If you don’t have that context, through training or the bruises of experience, and you just take what AI hands you, that’s a problem. You need someone who can judge where it’s missing. At ketteQuest, Chris Amet compared having agents to fifty talented interns: let them go do whatever they want, and you’re probably not getting what you need. They want to please you, just like AI, but they haven’t made any mistakes yet. AI will give you another answer if you’re wrong, but it won’t course-correct on its own. That takes someone who’s learned the ropes.

Q: How does combining Salesforce with ketteQ’s PolymatiQ™ agneticagentic solver change what’s possible in planning, and what truly differentiates ketteQ from traditional tools?

A: It gives you possibilities you wouldn’t have otherwise. A static plan, which is what most demand planning tools give you, is a forecast, and that’s it. With Salesforce data and PolymatiQ™, on the same platform, your analysis is almost infinite. Turn the working capital knob and see how everything else falls out, or shift toward on-time to first promise and see what that costs in safety stock. That speed is the real differentiator. Traditional forecasting is one-and-done, weekly or monthly. I’ve sat in rooms where someone says, we like this, but we need more analysis, and that takes days elsewhere. ketteQ does it on the fly.

Q: What advice would you give a supply chain leader still living in manual spreadsheet-based planning?

A: Pause for a moment and look at your process, your people, and what you’re really trying to achieve. It’s easy to say you’ll buy new technology; there are dozens of solutions out there. But you must first figure out your guiding principles. That’s why grounding everyone in the basics of good supply chain management matters. Once you know your objectives, you can decide how technology gets you there. Without that, any tool will work or won’t work for you, and that’s where a lot of companies waste money.

Q: Customers often describe ketteQ’s engine as feeling like having thousands of planners that never sleep, working around the clock, running unlimited scenarios. Does that match what you see?

A: That’s exactly it. Running thousands of constrained scenarios simultaneously and returning the best answer in seconds is like having a group of people doing nothing but that, one after another, without getting tired. You can make those changes live, in the boardroom, with finance, supply chain, sales, and even the CEO in the room. Someone asks what happens if we do this, and you see the answer on the screen instead of waiting days or weeks testing. That matters more now than ever. The environment is so volatile, there is no status quo anymore, and a tool that moves at the speed of the market is what sets ketteQ apart.

Q: If you had to describe ketteQ in one word, what would it be?

A: Resiliency. Instead of handing you a plan, it gives you decision-making tools on the fly that let you respond to and adapt to a constantly changing environment. That’s the word: resiliency.

Frank’s perspective is a useful check on the moment we’re in where agents and AI get the headlines, but none of it works without the fundamentals of good supply chain management underneath it. At ketteQ, that’s exactly why we built PolymatiQ™ to run thousands of scenarios in seconds on the same platform as your customer and sales data, so the people who’ve earned that judgment can make the call, on the fly, with the full picture in front of them.

To learn more about how ketteQ, powered by PolymatiQ™, helps supply chain leaders plan and adapt at the speed of the business, visit ketteq.com.