French supply chain leaders are, on paper, the most impatient in the world to hand day-to-day decisions to artificial intelligence. That is the headline from a new IDC study run for software vendor Kinaxis, which surveyed more than 2,000 supply chain executives across nine countries.
France out in front
Some 54% of French respondents said they expect largely autonomous operations within two years. No other country in the survey scored higher, and the figure sits well above the global average of 41%. It points to an appetite for AI-driven planning that runs ahead of much of the field.
Ambition is not the same as readiness, though. Like their peers in Germany and the UK, more than one in five French leaders (22%) admitted their AI strategy is still early-stage or unclear. The enthusiasm is real. So is the gap between intent and execution.
Trust is the sticking point
What holds adoption back is confidence. A little over half of those surveyed, 52%, named insufficient trust as a barrier. According to Kinaxis, the missing piece inside most companies is governance: a way to oversee and account for the decisions an algorithm makes, not just high-level principles set somewhere above the operation.
Fabienne Cetre, the vendor’s vice-president for Europe, argued that this is precisely where its Maestro platform is meant to fit, letting each AI recommendation be explained and audited before anyone acts on it. Whether that reassurance is enough to move French intentions into live, autonomous operations by 2028 is the question the next two years will answer.
