Job profiling: How artificial intelligence supports the management of complexity induced by product variety

Firms and supply chains (SC) increasingly are forced to customise products and optimise processes since today’s markets are, on average, more demanding in terms of both costs and customer satisfaction. Generally, when product variety (PV) increases not only improves sales performance, since products offered better fit customers’ expectations, but also increases the complexity in SC processes management, rising operational costs. For that reason, accurate management of product diversity is a fundamental point for the brands' success, which is why it is going to be investigated in that project. Moreover, firms’ managers apply strategies to mitigate or accommodate this complexity, avoiding the customer satisfaction and cost trade-off to remain competitive and survive. However, we were wondering if it is enough. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged to stay. Digitalisation era, data availability, and the improvement in computing power have boomed AI’s potential in improving systems, controlling processes, and tackling complexity. These strengths are suitable to help managers not only to tackle the complexity arising from PV but also to boost the supply chain performance (SCP