Gartner predicts that just 5 percent of organizations implementing supply chain automation will make at least 10 percent of their planning decisions autonomously by 2030 — a striking constraint on expectations for an industry pouring billions into AI.

The forecast, drawn from Gartner surveys and client interactions, draws a hard line between AI that supports decisions through insights and AI that actually makes the decisions. For apparel sourcing and planning teams, that distinction matters: tools that flag demand shifts or suggest reorder points are not the same as systems placing orders without a human in the loop.

Buse Aras, director analyst in Gartner's supply chain practice, said technology budgets will not close the gap on their own.

"Spending millions on supply chain planning automation can expand technical capabilities, but investment alone does not create AI readiness," Aras said.

He argued that leaders must build the necessary technology and talent foundations before scaling AI-enabled planning. Without them, organizations "risk funding technology that does not improve the planning decisions that matter most."

The prediction keeps human oversight at the center of supply chain operations for the foreseeable future, with AI delegated to lower-consequence tasks. Aras expects AI to support or augment decisions rather than drive them autonomously in most organizations, even as investment continues.

"Full autonomy will remain concentrated in routine, high-frequency and lower-risk decisions because data readiness, system integration, trust and accountability remain as barriers, while complex and strategic decisions will continue to require human oversight," he said.

That outlook tracks with what Gartner measured earlier this year. In an August survey of 394 supply chain professionals at companies with revenue of at least $250 million, more than half of supply chain officers said they could not determine their return on investment from AI, despite the sums already committed.

MIT reached a similar conclusion in a landmark study on generative AI published last year. Of the $40 billion funneled into enterprise AI investment, 95 percent of organizations had yet to see any returns.

Not everyone shares the cautious view. Software company Kinaxis, which surveyed more than 2,000 supply chain leaders across nine markets including the U.S. earlier this year, found that 41 percent expect autonomous supply chains at scale to be their operating model within one to two years. That confidence comes despite only one in eight organizations having fully embedded AI governance — a gap that suggests execution risk even among the optimistic cohort.

For brands and suppliers weighing where to direct planning technology budgets, the Gartner forecast implies a pragmatic sequencing: fix data foundations and governance first, target autonomy at routine high-frequency decisions, and keep buyers and planners accountable for strategic calls. As the evidence accumulates that heavy AI spend has yet to translate into measurable planning gains for most organizations, Gartner expects human oversight to remain the operating norm through the end of the decade.