van Balkom, Patrick
20 years of digital end to end supply chain experience at Mars, Unilever and a direct to consumer company.
Currently: Center of Excellence Planning (Europe) Director at Mars (M&M, Bounty, Twix, Celebrations,....) responsible for the digital transformation of our planning processes from supplier to customer.
Session
Can you truly bet your business on AI? For most, the answer is no. LLMs excel at stand-alone tasks, but their "black-box" guessing is a liability for core processes. Our experience at Mars proved this: in a complex supply chain, 98% accuracy per step still leads to systemic failure. This creates a conflict where employees don't want an AI that guesses, they need an AI that knows by learning from their expertise.
This talk reveals the architectural shift required to create AI you can bet your business on. We introduce the "Context-Lake," our innovative architecture, demonstrated through a Mars case study, that builds a "Trust Bridge" between people and machines. By capturing explicit business logic in a knowledge graph, we move beyond the limits of RAG. This approach de-risks enterprise AI , transforming it from a probabilistic liability into a deterministic asset that enhances employee collaboration and delivers reliable outcomes (opens the black box and kills halucinations).
Intended Audience an key takeaway:
For leaders: wonder why AI is so hard to embrace in business while it is so successful for consumers? most AI is actually great guesswork - this is not the language most large businesses speak. By moving AI form a black box to a glass box and putting your company context into a glass box too, you can eliminate the fear factor of "what if it guesses wrong" thus AI progress becomes as intuitive and symbiotic as google maps.
A framework to articulate the business-impact limitations of LLMs to senior leadership.
Enterprise Architects: a key peace to unlock AI is the new concept of a contextlake. A place where company context is stored, validated by employees and readable by AI. With AI maintenance the once complex graphical database can do this job for you.
company AI developers: Agents do not just feed on data and context windows they need to be connected to the context of the company. This is what a graphical database can do for you with the right ontology. It also avoids hallucination and ensures that in the big context of a big company the right answer is found for the right employee.
project managers: the real business value of AI is not taking over a task by beating the employees at their own game but by mutual development where AI learns from the human and the human from the AI. This builds trust, efficiency and a lasting insight on how to be successful.
Also practical first steps to get there are shared.