AI spending will reach $2.59 trillion worldwide this year, and retailers now dedicate an average of 15% of their IT budgets to AI — up 27% year over year. Yet inventory distortion, product in the wrong place at the wrong time, is still costing the industry $1.73 trillion a year, a number that has barely moved. Retail optimized experiences before it optimized decisions. That's the gap this playbook closes.

This playbook introduces the Decision Intelligence Engine — the sense, decide, execute, learn loop behind a decision-centric supply chain — and the operating model that runs it stage by stage, with named owners, cadence, and outputs. It shows how four Altimetrik engagements moved that loop from batch to real time: a 76% cut in data processing time, an autonomous MLOps forecasting platform, continuous drift detection, and a 70% faster planning runtime stretching a 500-day horizon.

It also gives leaders three tools to act on immediately: the Decision Value Matrix for prioritizing which decisions to fund first, the Decision Ownership Framework for deciding what AI should automate, augment, or escalate to a human, and the Decision Intelligence Index — a five-dimension maturity self-assessment leaders can score their own organization against before the next planning cycle.