From Prompts to Python: Tools in Analytics

Why It Matters

The approach can drastically accelerate operational decision-making—identifying at-risk shipments and focusing carrier management in near real-time—while lowering the technical barrier for supply-chain teams, forcing firms to upskill staff or risk losing competitive advantage.

Summary

University of Washington supply-chain faculty Dan Stall and PhD researcher Arsalan demonstrated how consumer-grade AI chat tools can turn raw shipment datasets into actionable analytics without traditional coding. By uploading historical and next-day shipment files and using a handful of prompts, the presenters showed ChatGPT producing data descriptions, interactive maps, predictive risk scores and carrier-prioritization recommendations in minutes—tasks that would normally take days or weeks of data-science work. The session emphasized practical, low-barrier use of AI as an assistant for logistics teams and walked through prompt design and workflow for real-world deployment. Presenters also flagged rapid model improvements and the need for user awareness of data context and limitations.

Original Description

In this webinar, Ph.D. student Arsalan Esmaili explores how artificial intelligence is transforming analytics in supply chain, logistics, and transportation. Using a real-world logistics dataset, the session demonstrates how AI tools can translate natural language prompts into functional Python code, making advanced analytics more accessible to a broader range of users.

The presentation walks through a complete analytics workflow, from identifying meaningful questions in raw data to generating and refining code, conducting exploratory analysis, building a simple predictive model, and interpreting results to support decision-making. The session highlights how AI can serve as a collaborative tool, helping practitioners work more efficiently while leveraging their domain expertise to drive insights and impact.

This event is part of our webinar series on Applied AI in the Modern Supply Chain.