I wonder whether this might change with increasingly powerful computer-human hybrid systems. So instead of "I want to grow, and my current 100 suppliers are an

I wonder whether this might change with increasingly powerful computer-human hybrid systems. So instead of "I want to grow, and my current 100 suppliers are an unmanageable drag on that." being followed by "I need that consolidated towards 10, so my purchasing agents can talk with them all more often, and thus better manage my supply chain.", it might instead be followed by "I need that replicated towards 1000, so my purchasing software has the sample sizes and redundancy to do the machine learning and statistics to better manage my supply network." > When you're smaller, have smaller scale suppliers, and less complicated distribution network A more complicated to manage network in some ways. Lots of fine grain tactical purchasing with multiple competing suppliers, that you couldn't staff at supermarket scale.