Retail supply chain operations rely on coupled decision modules that must adapt as requirements evolve. LLMs offer a natural-language interface for this task, but existing methods primarily focus on individual optimization models. Extending them to heterogeneous decision pipelines is challenging because a requirement may admit multiple intervention paths with different downstream effects. We formulate requirement-driven adaptation as the joint selection of an intervention route and an admissible module-level change, and propose a graph-constrained agentic framework in which domain agents expose admissible reformulation interfaces and a central processor searches over bounded intervention paths. Candidates are validated and compared using downstream KPIs. In collaboration with a large retail partner, we evaluate 100 warehouse requirements elicited from practitioner interviews, with GPT, Qwen, and DeepSeek as base LLMs. Relative to direct LLM reformulation, our framework improves correctness and end-to-end success across all three models, raising end-to-end success from 72--76% to 79--83%.
Large language model providers are compute constrained, and their universal response to congestion is to degrade service: route queries to smaller models, cut reasoning effort, truncate context. The industry's accounting says this saves money. We show the accounting is wrong, because it prices a query when the customer buys an answer. A degraded answer fails with some probability, and a failed answer either returns as a retry, inflating arrivals when the system is most loaded, or departs as churn, destroying lifetime value on a ledger no cost dashboard displays. We model inference allocation with three classical primitives: a newsvendor whose stockout cost is churned lifetime value, a geometric retry multiplier in which the recycled product is dissatisfaction, and a two-regime transient queue whose arrival rate is made endogenous by retries. Statically, there is a nonempty, measurable regime in which a cheaper model saves energy per satisfied answer while consuming strictly more capacity per satisfied answer, so the discount inverts exactly when capacity binds. Dynamically, a reactive throttle fired during a surge can cross an ignition threshold beyond which it manufactures more traffic than it sheds, and a release rule set below the degraded equilibrium converts a transient surge into a permanent degraded regime. With heterogeneous customers, throttling is a transportation problem in retry-inflated load whose optimal policy rations intelligence by critical ratio, class by class, and whose dual, the shadow price of intelligence, prices a marginal query by class and by hour; closed-form trajectories make it computable in milliseconds. Stochastic analysis sharpens rather than erodes the thesis: the ignition boundary acquires a predicted width, and noise punishes the reactive policy that parks the system against it. Under congestion, throttling is not a cost lever but a demand lever.
As LLM agents move from decision support to autonomous procurement, firms need to know whether delegated negotiators create value, divide it predictably, and avoid money-losing contracts. We study this in a canonical supply chain bargaining problem: a buyer with private demand information negotiates a quantity-payment contract with an uninformed seller. We benchmark nine LLMs from OpenAI, Google, and Alibaba against a validated Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium across 9,840 LLM-to-LLM negotiations. First, capability governs value creation. Agents agree in 98.9% of negotiations and capture 95.4% of first-best surplus undiscounted, but average 2.98 rounds against the benchmark's 1.25, and this delay erodes 21-34% of surplus. Capability also governs reliability: baseline models accept individually irrational contracts in 19.2% of cases, versus 0.0-0.6% at mid-tier and flagship, making automated profit verification the binding guardrail below that threshold. Second, surplus capture is relational. Provider identity predicts who captures surplus better than capability rank: self-play buyer shares average 40% for OpenAI, 50% for Google, and 70% for Alibaba's Qwen, an ordering that survives restricted communication and no discounting. Reversing which provider sells moves the division by 7-18 percentage points, and the capable Qwen flagship is the weakest cross-family seller: vendor choice is a first-order distributional decision. Third, the prompt is a strategic lever. Delegation separates the principal's economic patience from the agent's prompted strategic patience, a free deployment choice that is the single strongest driver of surplus division (90% of explained variance). Together these establish an equilibrium-referenced audit of AI agents along three dimensions: discounted efficiency, distributional profile, and operational reliability.
LLM agents are increasingly evaluated on multi-week decision tasks in which the state that drives cost is never directly observed. On such tasks the final cost cannot say why an agent failed: it may have misread the world, or read it correctly and still failed to act (the knowing-doing gap). Existing evaluations cannot separate these two failures; their reference policies either read privileged information the agent never sees, or are missing altogether. We introduce STOCKTAKE, a 26-week supply-chain replenishment benchmark built as a factored partially observable Markov decision process with six hidden factor processes, designed so that a fair reference policy is computable: an exact Bayes filter per factor drives a rollout policy on the identical observation stream the agent receives. Scoring each run between a symptom-blind base-stock floor (0) and this oracle (1) yields a skill score, and grading each week's written rationale yields a stated-belief detection lag and a knowing-doing rate, so state estimation and control are measured separately. On fifty seeds with curated stress profiles, Claude Sonnet 5, GPT-5.4, DeepSeek-V4-Pro, and Grok 4.5 detect 84-88% of hidden failures, typically within a week of onset, yet span skill scores from 0.62 to -0.23: two of the four end below the symptom-blind floor while naming factors slightly faster than the two that beat it. The failure has two faces. Where stress persists, 34-43% of correctly diagnosed stress weeks still end in stockout for every model, a rate that partly reflects the severity of the weeks models notice. That rate also runs opposite to skill: the two models under the floor stock out least on diagnosed weeks, so under-response is only one face of the gap, and their traces point to the other, responses whose cost exceeds what they protect. STOCKTAKE measures both directions of that failure.
AI agents in supply chains face a fundamental epistemic gap: large language models (LLMs) interpret policies but lack physical grounding, while reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes flows but is semantically blind to unstructured constraints. We introduce REFLECTICHAIN, bridging this gap through a Generative Supply Chain World Model (SC-WM) - encoding heterogeneous supply networks into a 6-dim graph-latent space with physical conservation - and Double-Loop Learning that separates epistemic uncertainty (KL-trust-region-bounded policy adaptation) from aleatoric uncertainty (stochastic latent rollouts). On Semi-Sim, a 10-node semiconductor benchmark with SIR risk propagation, 6 perturbation types, and 10 policy constraint templates, REFLECTICHAIN improves Rationale Consistency Score by 33.0% (p < 0.0001, d = 2.78), maintains 82.3% operability under adversarial shocks, and exhibits anti-fragile behavior (+40.2% gain under moderate pressure). We identify three operational epistemic mechanisms - uncertainty separation, knowledge-boundary detection, and empirical Bayesian policy updating - and discuss five limitation categories.