Demand planning, supply planning and customer service may converge into one customer-facing role

Florent Tronquit argues that demand planning, supply planning and customer service could converge into a single end-to-end role by 2032—not because AI eliminates the work, but because agents increasingly handle repetitive coordination tasks.

In his proposed model, AI manages more of the no-touch workload, while people focus on customer relationships, diagnosis, exceptions and decisions. The emerging role resembles a customer success manager responsible for performance across demand, supply and service rather than within one functional silo.

The more significant change concerns performance measurement. Traditional internal indicators such as forecast bias, internal inventory and OTIF would be complemented—or challenged—by customer-facing measures such as store coverage, on-shelf availability and forecast accuracy from the customer’s perspective.

Operational perspective: merging roles does not automatically create end-to-end accountability. Organizations must define which decisions the new role owns, which actions AI agents may execute, how conflicts between commercial, inventory and service objectives are resolved, and when specialists must intervene.

The transition also requires common customer, demand, inventory and order data across CRM, ERP, APS and customer-service systems. Without reconciled definitions and shared targets, a combined role risks inheriting the same silos under a new title.

A practical pilot should begin with one customer segment or business unit. Teams can test whether a single accountable owner improves response time, on-shelf availability, forecast collaboration and service recovery while documenting AI recommendations, manual overrides and escalation paths.