In today’s tumultuous world, supply chain disruptions and price hikes are not just a possibility, they are almost a given. The causes of supply chain disruption are myriad (tariffs, pandemics, natural disasters)¹ but the net result is the same: if unprepared, your cost of goods will increase and your bottom line will suffer. Any industry that relies on a formulation process will face this challenge: consumer goods, industrial and household cleaning products, foods and flavors, cosmetics and fragrances, the list of potentially impacted industries goes on and on. So, what can companies do to stay ahead of these disruptions?

Some companies are choosing to pass rising production costs on to the customer or offer smaller quantities for the same prices. However, customer dissatisfaction with ‘shrinkflation’ practices is rising, and companies that can avoid them would do well to maintain their brand image.²

Traditionally, companies would seek to fortify their production lines. This would include sourcing alternative suppliers that are not subject to tariffs and import fees. However, this isn’t possible for every supply chain - for example some ingredients can only grow in specific regions, and minerals only exist in specific parts of the world. It also may not be possible to find alternative suppliers for your ingredients without major changes to your formulation; you may require a certain ingredient purity or quality unavailable anywhere else. With supply chain instability a steadily growing concern,³ how do forward-thinking companies proceed?

The Rise of AI

Diversifying suppliers may still help mitigate some immediate disruptions, but when it comes to long-term resilience, it’s no longer enough. The future lies in reformulating your products to reduce reliance on scarce or expensive ingredients and adapt to volatility. Unfortunately, reformulation has been traditionally time consuming and costly. Finding ingredients or chemicals with similar properties and optimizing your formulations can take many months or even years of experimentation.

Organizations across industries are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle tasks that were once considered arduous, difficult, or even impossible to solve. Over 71% of respondents of a recent 2025 McKinsey Global Survey now say that their organizations use AI in at least one business function (up from 65% in 2024), and responses showed that product development is the second most used application, after Marketing.⁴  

What’s more, AI is not just increasing business efficiency, it has repeatedly smashed through previous scientific walls, helping to solve the protein structure prediction problem (which won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry),⁵ aiding doctors to interpret medical images with greatly improved accuracy,⁶ is the core technology behind autonomous vehicles,^7,8 and is now being used broadly in pharma to supercharge drug development.⁹ While AI has transformed industries from healthcare to transportation, its potential for product development is equally significant. By leveraging emerging science-based AI (SBAI) techniques, companies can solve complex formulation challenges that once took months or years in a fraction of the time.

The 2025 McKinsey report also revealed that many companies are now building their own AI departments, but 99% say that they are still in the beginning stages of deployment. However, in the cases it has been applied, companies report increased revenue and decreased costs.⁴ In industries where product development and chemical formulations are at the heart of operations, early adoption of AI could significantly shorten time-to-market and reduce the costs of traditional reformulation processes. Partnering with an already developed AI platform allows you to bypass the development phase and kickstart your AI accelerated journey.

NobleAI’s Visualization, Insight, and Prediction (VIP) Platform is built for this moment. Created by experts in chemistry, materials science, and machine learning, it brings a Science-Based AI (SBAI) approach that combines scientific principles with advanced AI, making modeling and reformulation more accessible across teams. The VIP Platform is designed to help R&D, data science, and product teams move quickly and confidently, even amid uncertainty. It enables seamless collaboration around data, allows teams to run predictions, and uncover insights that would typically take months using traditional methods. SBAI on the VIP Platform goes far beyond ingredient replacement, it will also help you optimize recipes to create more performant, compliant, and sustainable products overall!

Conclusion

Supply chain instability plagues all industries and is a problem that isn’t going away. While supplier diversification can help alleviate this problem, companies who reformulate their products to keep up with a rapidly changing world will be better adapted to succeed. AI-powered solutions like those offered on NobleAI’s VIP Platform offer a faster, data-driven approach to reformulation. By leveraging SBAI, businesses can quickly identify alternative ingredients, assess risks, and ultimately innovate their products to not only survive supply chain issues but thrive in the face of them.

Citations:

1. https://tax.thomsonreuters.com/blog/2025s-supply-chain-challenge-confronting-complexity-and-disruption-in-global-trade-tri/
2. https://civicscience.com/as-shrinkflation-becomes-more-prevalent-consumers-grow-less-brand-loyal/
3. https://kpmg.com/us/en/articles/2023/supply-chain-stability-index.html
4. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai
5. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/press-release/
6. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666990024000132
7. https://www.micron.com/about/blog/applications/automotive/self-driving-cars-will-rely-on-ai-innovative-memory
8. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/transportation/ai-in-transportation.html
9. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095177925000656

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