AI in Inventory Demand Planning Quiz

Answers and explanations appear as you take the quiz.

1. What is the main goal of AI demand planning?
   • To predict how much of each product will sell so the right stock is in the right place
   • To design the product packaging
   • To hire more warehouse staff automatically
   • To set employee salaries
2. Why are probabilistic forecasts (distributions, not single numbers) valuable?
   • They make reports look more complicated
   • They let planners set safety stock against a target service level
   • They eliminate the need for any inventory
   • They guarantee demand will never change
3. What are the two costly outcomes that demand planning tries to avoid?
   • High prices and low prices
   • Fast shipping and slow shipping
   • Stockouts and overstock
   • New products and old products
4. What is an advantage of 'global' forecasting models?
   • They only work for one product at a time
   • They require no data at all
   • They only operate in one country
   • They forecast many related items jointly, learning shared patterns
5. Which external signal would most help forecast perishable grocery demand?
   • Weather and holiday data
   • The CEO's birthday
   • The warehouse paint color
   • The number of office printers
6. What is a potential benefit of a pretrained time-series foundation model for demand planning?
   • It guarantees accurate forecasts for every new product
   • It can be adapted or used zero-shot on time series beyond those seen in a particular downstream task, subject to evaluation
   • It eliminates the need to evaluate forecasts on business data
   • It replaces inventory constraints and replenishment policies
7. Which additional signals can demand planners combine with historical sales?
   • Only the warehouse’s wall color
   • The brand of the company’s laptops
   • Promotions, prices, web activity, and relevant weather or holiday information
   • The number of employees in the finance department
8. How can a local demand forecast help an e-commerce company decide where to place fast-moving stock?
   • It guarantees every order will ship from the nearest warehouse
   • It removes the need to track inventory levels
   • It converts warehouse coordinates into product prices
   • It can guide allocation to regional warehouses serving areas with higher forecast demand