The End of Spreadsheets: How Agentic AI is Building the Customer-Centric Supply Chain of Tomorrow

Blog / The End of Spreadsheets: How Agentic AI is Building the Customer-Centric Supply Chain of Tomorrow

For years, the holy grail of supply chain management has been to become truly “customer-centric.” Yet, for most organizations, this goal has remained frustratingly out of reach.

The reason? Planners-the very people tasked with anticipating customer needs—have been forced to fight a modern war with archaic weapons: spreadsheets and pivot tables. They spend their days manually stitching together data from siloed systems, creating a picture of the past instead of a clear vision of the future.

But what if your supply chain could operate with the prescient, real-time intelligence of a ride-sharing network? Imagine a system that not only sees a spike in demand but understands why it’s happening and automatically dispatches inventory to meet it. This isn’t a futuristic dream. This is the game-changing reality delivered by Planning in a Box – Pi Agent, supercharged by Google’s Gemini AI and orchestrated within Google Agentspace.

The Power of Seeing the Whole Picture: Structured and Unstructured Data

The biggest limitation of the traditional, Excel-driven approach is its inability to see the full context. It can process structured data-the clean, organized numbers like sales history from an ERP-but it’s completely blind to the messy, yet incredibly valuable, world of unstructured data.

This is where Google’s Gemini changes everything.

Gemini powers Planning in a Box, an AI-powered platform designed to unify data and accelerate supply chain planning. At the core of this platform is the Pi Agent, an Agentic AI assistant that interacts with your business context to deliver intelligent recommendations and automate planning tasks.

Together, they bring a revolutionary ability to understand and analyze both structured and unstructured data simultaneously:

Structured Data:

• Sales figures
  
• Inventory levels
  
• Shipment data
  
• Production schedules
  

Unstructured Data:

• Customer reviews
  
• Social media posts
  
• News articles
  
• Weather reports
• Even images from store shelves

By fusing these two worlds, the Planning in a Box – Pi Agent develops a deep, contextual understanding of the market that is impossible to achieve with pivot tables alone. It moves from simply reporting what happened to understanding why it happened—and predicting what will happen next.

A Colombian Retailer’s Transformation: From Reactive to Ride-Share

Let’s see how this works in the real world. Consider “Tiendas del Futuro,” a major retail chain in Colombia struggling with unpredictable demand for its products, especially during local festivals and holidays. Their planning team lives in Excel, constantly reacting to stockouts in one city and costly overstock in another.

The Challenge:

The Festival of Flowers in Medellín is approaching. How can Tiendas del Futuro accurately predict demand for high-margin items like premium coffee and floral-themed home goods?

The Agentic AI Solution in Action

Demand Sensing (with Gemini Power):

The Pi Agent, running on the Planning in a Box platform, ingests a torrent of data that would crash any spreadsheet.

Structured:

• It pulls real-time Point-of-Sale (POS) data from all stores and historical sales data from their SAP system.
  

Unstructured:

• It analyzes social media, detecting a spike in posts and excitement around the festival, specifically mentioning “coffee tours” and “decorating with flowers.”
  
• It reads local news articles and tourism board announcements, confirming record attendance is expected.
  
• It processes weather forecasts, predicting sunny, warm weather perfect for outdoor celebrations.
  
• It even analyzes images sent from store managers in Medellín showing competitor displays for similar items.
  

AI-Driven Demand Forecasting

The old Excel model would simply look at last year’s sales. The Pi Agent does something far more intelligent. It synthesizes all this data and forecasts a massive 40% spike in demand for premium coffee and a 25% lift in home goods-but only in its Medellín stores, and specifically for the 10 days surrounding the festival.

See How It Works for You

Curious how this could apply to your supply chain?

Request a demo and see Planning in a Box – Pi Agent in action, analyzing structured and unstructured data to anticipate demand and act-before it’s too late.

Intelligent Inventory Positioning: The “Ride-Share” Moment

This is where the magic happens. Instead of a blanket, nationwide inventory increase, the Pi Agent recommends a series of precise, surgical moves-much like a ride-share app dispatching cars to a surge area.

• It flags an incoming shipment of coffee destined for Bogotá and recommends rerouting 60% of it to the Medellín distribution center.
  
• It identifies a surplus of home goods in a slower-moving region like Pasto and advises on an inter-store transfer to the highest-traffic Medellín locations.
  
• It automatically generates the necessary orders and transfer requests within the ERP system.

Why This is a Game Changer: Pi Agent on Agentspace

This transformation is about more than just better data; it’s about fundamentally changing how work gets done.

Planners Become Strategists

The planning team at Tiendas del Futuro is no longer bogged down by manual data entry. They are now strategic decision-makers. They can ask the Pi Agent questions in natural language, like,

“Simulate the profit impact of a 10% price increase on home goods during the festival.”

They use the AI’s insights to guide strategy, not just report on history.

A Collaborative Digital Workforce

Within Google Agentspace, the system becomes even more powerful. The “Demand Agent” communicates its forecast to an “Inventory Agent,” which then coordinates with a “Logistics Agent” to execute the physical movement of goods. This autonomous, multi-agent collaboration works 24/7 to optimize the supply chain.

A New Era of Customer-Centric Supply Chain Planning

This is the end of the spreadsheet era.

The combination of comprehensive data integration, the multi-modal power of Gemini, and the collaborative framework of Agentspace provides a platform that doesn’t just assist planners-it empowers them to build a truly intelligent, responsive, and customer-centric supply chain.