On the morning of Monday, June 03, 2024, the Business School held the 17th Session of the Series of Academic Lectures Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Founding of Central University of Finance and Economics and the 6th Session of the Excellent Academic Forum Lecture Series in 2024 at the Conference Room 615 of the Main Teaching Building on theXueyuanSouth Road Campus of the Central University of Finance and Economics. Professor QiYinanfrom the School of Supply Chain and Operations Management of the University of International Business and Economicswas invitedas a guest speaker. More than 30 people from the Business School, including teachers, doctoral students and master students, attended this event.

This meeting was chaired byProfessorLiuXiaohongfrom the Business School. Before the official start of this lecture,ProfessorLiuXiaohongintroduced Professor QiYinan’sresume in detail. QiYinanis a professor of supply chain and operations management at the International Business School of the University of International Business and Economics, director of the Development Planning Department, and former president of Association of Supply Chain and Operations Management (ASCOM). His research interests include supply chain resilience, digital supply chain, supply chain innovation, supply chain collaboration and sustainable supply chain. Professor Qi has presided over and participated in more than 10 national and provincial-level projects, serves as the sub-project leader of key projects of the National Natural Science Foundation and major special fund projects of the National Social Science Foundation, and has presided over 4 research collaboration project under agreements with government and public institutions. He has published more than 30 papers in well-known domestic and foreign academic journals, including Journal of Operations Management, Decision Sciences, International Journal of Production Economics, Journal of Supply Chain Management, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, andTechnovationand so on. Professor QiYinanpublished 2 teaching cases that were included in the Ivey Business School’s case library, and published 1 case collection in collaboration with the Ivey Business School.

The topic of the lecture delivered by Professor QiYinanis “Too Much of Artificial Intelligence?AI adoption in procurement and product availability”.This research aims to explore how the application of supplier AI affects the availability of retailer products during the procurement process. Theoretically, the application of AI in the procurement process may have two conflicting effects on product availability: an efficiency-enhancing effect that increases product availability, and an expertise-excluding effect that decreases product availability. The application effect of AI depends on the trade-off between these two effects. Furthermore, the trade-off between these two opposing effects may vary with the intensity of AI use, and accordingly result in non-linear effects on product availability. This research collects data from a leading online retailer to study how the use intensity of supplier AI affects the retailer's product availability. The empirical results show that the use intensity of AI has a positive and significant overall effect. Nonlinear analysis shows that as the use intensity of AI increases, this effect presents an inverted U-shaped trend. This indicates that more AI applications do not necessarily lead to better product availability. Excessive use of AI in procurement may have adverse effects on product availability.

After the sharing,with regard to the topic of ProfessorQiYinan’slecture, the attending teachers and students actively participated in the discussion about research models and publication of high-level papers and so on, further deepening their academic exchanges.

The “Excellent Academic Forum” is an academic exchange platform established by the Business School to fulfill the mission of “contributing new management knowledge”, which focuses on cutting-edge theoretical issues and organizational development dilemmas in the discipline of business administration and the Chinese enterprise management practice, and brings together frontier ideas and innovative ideas in China and abroad, so as to explore Chinese solutions for China's social and economic development.