Simulation Before Optimization: Why Enterprise Planning Needs a Causal Model of the Business

We are getting dramatically better at forecasting, optimising and automating individual parts of the supply chain, but enterprises still lack a coherent representation of how decisions propagate across demand, supply, inventory, pricing, finance and enterprise value. As autonomous agents and continuous planning arrive, the question shifts from how fast a decision can be made to what model of cause and consequence the AI is reasoning against. This session traces the progression from forecast to causality to simulation to decision: why prediction alone is insufficient for intervention, how causal models could connect fragmented planning domains, and what an enterprise equivalent of a "world model" might look like, drawing on approaches emerging in autonomous vehicles, humanoid robotics and spatial computing.