Supply chain organizations in 2026 are seeing a fast rollout of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) tools, but the future of enterprise software will include both IQ (an intelligence quotient) and EQ (an emotional quotient), combining the power of predictive AI with the “contextual intelligence” of human professionals, according to software firm Manhattan Associates.
In the company’s words, “you manage the intent, we manage the machinery,” Manhattan executives said today at their annual “Momentum” user conference in Las Vegas.
In Manhattan’s view, an external AI agent alone cannot safely optimize a global supply chain, because humans are still needed to determine the business rules, workflows, and decision logic.
The company acknowledged that many supply chain professionals would be wary of an approach where AI could autonomously manage an entire warehouse, because “in our business, ‘almost correct’ is the same as ‘wrong’,” Manhattan Associates CTO Sanjeev Siotia said in a session at the show. Instead, the best way to harness the power of AI is for experienced human supply chain professionals to set deterministic roles and guardrails, and only then to apply the probabilistic power of AI agents, he said.
AI works best when it can be applied to a “unified” collection of cloud-based data and applications, giving it oversight of all the various supply chain functions needed to make an informed analysis. “AI alone is not the answer. But AI plus unification plus human ingenuity is the combination that can make it work,” Siotia said.
To determine the user’s intent, Manhattan said it has built a “Solution Design Studio” that can read a raw business requirements document and configure itself, without requiring the user to click through screens or translate business requirements into software code.