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Notes from the workbench

Short pieces on using AI in supply chain work: what I tried, what held up and what I would check before trusting it.

Recent posts

Illustration of a factory shift-change corner: a saffron horn loudspeaker on a brick wall above a clocking-in time clock, a rack of blank time cards, work jackets and ear defenders on hooks, and a bench by a tall window onto the assembly hall

Noël Vranckx • 27 Sept 2026

Gemini 3.8 TTS is for the people who never see your dashboard

Much of supply chain works with busy hands, busy eyes or a different first language. Google’s new text-to-speech models make a spoken briefing in every language on the line cost cents.

Illustration of an old barograph on a shelf whose pen traces a wavy line on its drum, the line continuing past the drum as a terracotta dotted fan of possible paths, beside bundles of rolled charts

Noël Vranckx • 27 Sept 2026

What time-series foundation models mean for demand planners

A forecasting model that has never seen your sales history can now beat you on some items. Here’s how to find out which ones, in one afternoon.

Illustration in front view of a mint workshop pegboard holding a row of bicycle hand tools, one printed in brick red, above a workbench with a coiled chain

Noël Vranckx • 26 Sept 2026

Ten Use Cases for Jev in your supply chain

Jev can only give answers you wrote down in advance. Here are ten places in a supply chain where that is exactly what you want.

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Illustration in side view of a 1950s harbour quay where a gantry crane lowers one ochre container, between a freight train and a small ship carrying identical containers

Noël Vranckx • 26 Sept 2026

MCP: the shipping container of AI

The metal box didn’t change global trade. The standard did. AI in supply chain is waiting for its own standard, and it has quietly arrived.

Illustration seen from above of scattered, mismatched paperwork whose scraps line up into tidy lanes linking two factories to five hubs, with a van and two lorries on the lanes and two hands setting the last strip in place

Noël Vranckx • 26 Sept 2026

Claude Opus 5.5 and the end of “clean your data first”

“Clean your data first” is the most repeated advice about AI in supply chain. For analysis work, it’s quickly becoming bad advice.

Illustration of a conveyor of boxed bicycle parts passing a sorting gate that routes most boxes into four trays and sends a few marked boxes to a planner at a desk

Noël Vranckx • 26 Sept 2026

Jev: the AI that doesn’t talk. It decides.

A new kind of AI model arrived this month. It can’t write an email, a poem or a line of code. For supply chain, that might be exactly the point.