Jarrod Goentzel on MIT’s Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab, AI and System Level Thinking
About this episode
The episode features an interview with Jarrod Goentzel discussing the evolution of the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab and the integration of AI in crisis response.
In this Humanitarian AI Today Voices flashpod, Eric Talbert, Co-founder of MedCycle Network guest hosts an interview with Jarrod Goentzel, founder and director of the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab in the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics. This interview dives into the evolution and modern practices of the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab for humanitarian professionals looking to optimize crisis response through system-level thinking and technology. The discussion traces the lab’s journey from its origins during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to its needs-assessment work and market-resilience studies to it’s general shift away from reactive, event-specific planning toward building structural, "system-level" understandings of supply chains and how organizations can better anticipate bottlenecks and coordinate with the private sector. For humanitarian professionals, the interview offers a grounded, pragmatic perspective on integrating artificial intelligence into crisis response. Goentzel explicitly addresses the limitations of relying solely on automated systems, noting that AI inherently struggles with data gaps, as it is bounded by what is publicly available and…
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