As AI increases at Columbia Sportswear, so does the threat surface

What’s worse, human error or AI workarounds? When it comes to managing threat surfaces, the question is a live one.

Clothing retailer Columbia is deploying AI across the company in a wide variety of places, including its e-commerce call center. The company’s head of automation, Dev Gulati, told IT Brew at Automation Anywhere’s Imagine conference in September that he is mindful of the concern and that steps have been taken to manage security.

“We have included, for example, information security data privacy…[so] that by mistake or inadvertently, we are not exposing the information,” Gulati said.

Center robotics. A commitment to security is important when you’re ramping up software robotics and automation technologies across your organization. Today, the company has 230 bots deployed across its operations. That came after three to four years of work, Gulati told us.

The company’s CFO leads and sponsors its center of excellence (CoE) on robotic process automation, Gulati said, meaning that return on investment is critical to determining how to use technological solutions in Columbia’s operations.

“Our head of supply chain, head of HR, [and] our CIO are the ones who are reading this CoE,” Gulati said. “We meet with them on a regular basis to understand, what are the priorities we should be working on?”

Useful AI. Columbia’s AI solutions have focused on automating supply chain management and dispute resolution processes, using the software machinery to cover aspects of its civil operations. Bots gather shipping and pricing dispute information, for example, and then deliver that data to a human operator who makes the final call on how to deal with the problem.

Columbia has also deployed AI to help with HR, using chatbots for questions on leave time, or paid time off and insurance policies.