Automated Negotiation for Future Supply Chains
If these projections prove broadly correct, suppliers that are not exposed through machine-consumable interfaces and standardized contracting protocols may face structural disadvantages relative to those that are. The NEC initiatives discussed in Section 5— the IFS partnership, the Catena-X and xIPF work, and the DTC testbed— each address one component of this transition: the ERP wiring( so that an agent ' s commitment posts to a real purchase order), the data-space contracting( so that information itself can be exchanged as a machine-negotiable asset), and the MAGS integration( so that the negotiator is informed by, and informs, the broader enterprise agent fabric). We do not claim that machine customers will become the customer in any general sense, but the direction of travel reported by multiple analysts and the early industrial deployments cited above are consistent enough that planning for partial machine-customer adoption appears reasonable for many enterprises.
6 FUTURE PROJECTIONS: A FIVE-YEAR VIEW
The trajectory of automated negotiation in supply chains can be projected with reasonable confidence along five interacting dimensions. Each is shown in Figure 7-1 and summarized in Table 7-1, then developed below.
Figure Future Projections: A Five-Year View-5: A five-year projection of automated negotiation in supply chains across five interacting dimensions.
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