Governance-Aware Use of Generative AI in Strategic Supply Chain Planning

Strategic planning in industrial supply chains involves long-term decisions on the allocation of scarce resources under conditions of structural uncertainty. These decisions are characterised by competing objectives, limited reversibility and substantial managerial responsibility. While recent research highlights the potential of artificial intelligence, and in particular generative AI, to support complex decision-making, existing contributions largely remain conceptual and provide limited guidance on how such capabilities can be operationalised in governance-sensitive strategic contexts. This paper addresses this gap by developing a governance-aware decision-support framework for the use of generative AI in strategic supply chain planning. Adopting a design science research approach, the study conceptualises generative AI as an organisational capability that supports, but does not replace, managerial judgement. Three interrelated artefacts are developed: an operative decision framework for strategic planning, a capability-to-decision mapping that links AI and generative AI capabilities to concrete decision functions and a governance-oriented implementation design that ensures responsibility, transparency and accountability. The proposed framework explicitly separates analytical evaluation, scenario exploration and final decision-making. Generative AI is positioned as an exploratory capability that expands the decision space by generating alternative scenarios and making implicit assumptions explicit, while normative trade-offs and resource allocation decisions remain firmly under managerial control. An illustrative, literature-based industrial use case demonstrates how the framework can support strategic decisions under resource scarcity without undermining governance requirements. The paper contributes to the literature by operationalising capability-based perspectives on AI for strategic planning and by introducing scarcity-aware decision support as a unifying lens. For practitioners, it provides a structured and transferable reference model for the responsible use of generative AI in strategic supply chain planning.