Human-Centric AI, Supply Chain Wisdom, and the Art of Strategic Leadership: A Conversation with Holger Carlsson

When you spend three decades building supply chains that serve 106 to 108 trillion dollars of global GDP, you learn something fundamental: the systems we design either serve humanity, or they crush it. In a wide-ranging conversation for our Voice of Experts series, Holger Carlsson—supply chain veteran, AI governance partner, and entrepreneurial visionary—shares hard-won insights on why the rush to automate is missing the point, how to build partnerships that actually last, and why leadership without white space is just firefighting.

From IKEA to the United Nations: A Career That Shaped a Philosophy

Holger's journey provides the foundation for everything that follows. Early roles managing IKEA's operations across Poland, Paris, and Southwest Europe taught him that supply chains are fundamentally human systems. His time with the United Nations—encountering field teams in Mali and Kosovo—broadened his perspective on what supply chains actually mean: they connect 8 billion people and billions in economic value.

"Every new experience gave a little bit more input to understand how the complex world of supply chains function," he reflects. "And that increasingly boosted my passion for this field."

But it's his most recent work that resonates most sharply with modern business challenges: founding Carson International and partnering with Credo AI on governance frameworks for responsible AI deployment.

Contracts as "Opportunity Systems," Not Legal Armor

One story encapsulates Holger's philosophy on partnerships. At IKEA, when negotiating with a major supplier of kitchen and wardrobe frames, the conventional approach would have been to squeeze maximum savings immediately. Instead, Holger proposed something radically different:

Split the price reduction into two parts. The first comes immediately. The second arrives six months later—if the supplier hits volume targets that prove the product sells and secures their production planning.

"If you truly want to build partnerships," he explains, "you want to make sure that your other partner is at least happy enough to keep going with a partnership."

This wasn't just a negotiation tactic. It was a reimagining of what contracts are. Rather than legal documents filed away after signatures dry, Holger embedded the agreement into the operational reality: "A contract has to be a living operational path for how you actually going to work your relationship."

The result? That agreement lasted over six years without renegotiation, adapted to new items and materials, and created sustainable value for both parties. That's what mutual accountability looks like.

The Gatekeeper Principle: Quality as Systemic Defense

Holger's solution to quality control reveals another counterintuitive insight. Rather than overwhelming teams with 90-page specification documents, IKEA distilled quality rules down to six visual checkpoints—pictures anyone could understand in any language.

A gatekeeper at the quality checkpoint became responsible for those six images, not the 90 pages. The psychological shift was profound: workers now understood they weren't just following rules; they were preventing catastrophic downstream failures.

"You have to make it sound as serious and grave as it is," Holger notes, "or it can become, in order for it to stick and create a momentum to be sustainable."

This principle applies everywhere: supply chains, administrative processes, logistics centers. Clarity of consequence creates ownership.

Sustainability as Profit Driver, Not Feel-Good Line Item

When Holger addresses sustainability at IKEA, he upends the typical framing. Sustainability isn't environmental virtue signaling—it's financial sustainability, organizational sustainability, process sustainability.

The breakthrough came when IKEA made every country manager also the Chief Sustainability Officer. This wasn't bureaucratic layering; it was alignment of accountability at the top, filtering down through every layer. You can't delegate accountability and expect results.

But here's the radical part: IKEA proved you don't need to be a conglomerate to do this. Small companies can reduce packaging materials from ten types to two (cardboard and shrink wrap), immediately cutting carbon footprint and unlocking regulatory credits.

"Every level you can integrate that approach," Holger says, "and you don't remove accountability from the top."

The Human-Centric AI Question: What Tasks Should Machines Actually Do?

This is where Holger's philosophy confronts modern business directly. When asked about AI automation, he refuses the false choice between "embrace all automation" and "resist change."

Instead, he distinguishes between tasks that are inhuman—repetitive, spirit-crushing, cognitively deadening—and tasks that require human judgment, creativity, and accountability.

The inhuman tasks: A textile worker inspecting fabric for weaving defects through a magnifier for eight hours. Four people watching an egg conveyor belt for eggshells. These aren't jobs; they're slow harm. AI can do this better, faster, without the psychological toll.

The human-centered automation: Use AI to scan pallets for compliance and sort them automatically—but free the humans for higher-value work. Replace three days of supply chain analysis with one hour of AI-assisted modeling, then use the remaining time for scenario planning and strategic judgment.

"The key and the challenge and the opportunity," Holger explains, "is in mixing those realities in clever ways that you know carries forward your strategy, reaches your business and human objectives, and keep growing."

AI Governance: Turning Threat into Opportunity

Here's where Holger's partnership with Credo AI becomes essential. The EU just implemented over 250 new AI regulations. Companies deploying AI face a three-way tension:

• The legal/compliance team saying "we must be careful"

• The risk team raising concerns

• The innovation team saying "we need to move fast"

Instead of resolving this as a conflict, structured AI governance makes it a unified process. Credo AI's framework takes use cases, performs risk assessments, and ensures all risks are addressed before deployment.

"Merging those two," Holger says, "is why what interested me with Credo AI. Take a step back, not forward. Figure out what this means for us. Make it safe. Make it regulatory compliant. And still move forward with it as an opportunity, more than a threat."

This is governance as enablement, not obstruction.

AI as a Talent Magnet, Not a Job Killer

The supply chain industry faces a massive talent shortage. Conventional wisdom says automation worsens this. Holger sees the opposite.

Imagine hiring 18, 22, and 24-year-old "gamers"—people fluent in algorithms, coding, and prompt engineering—to accelerate supply chain analysis. Give them AI tools to run complex models in hours instead of days. Then, have experienced supply chain leaders interpret those models, run scenarios, and make strategic decisions.

"I would definitely hire 22-year-old, 24-year-old, maybe 18-year-old gamers to do part of the analysis," he says, "because that's what they do. They love to run these different algorithms."

This isn't replacing jobs. It's creating entirely new career paths—a whole new class of human-AI collaboration roles that didn't exist five years ago.

"I think it's going to open up a lot more career paths when it comes to supply chain," he concludes.

The KPI Trap: When Metrics Mask Reality

Here's a story that should make every data-driven leader uncomfortable.

At IKEA, official KPIs showed handling damage at 0.5% of deliveries. Holger suspected reality was very different. So he did something radical: He went to the warehouse at 4 a.m. and actually checked.

The truth? 30% of pallets had damage. Not 0.5%. Thirty percent. Every third pallet.

The gap wasn't incompetence; it was misaligned incentives. The KPI system incentivized reporting damage below a certain threshold. People were gaming the metric, not solving the problem.

How do you fix this without destroying morale? Holger brought store managers directly into the definition process. They created visual standards together. And he reframed the outcome not as "you've been doing it wrong," but as "we just discovered we're disappointing 73 million customers annually because of this gap."

That changed the conversation.

The lesson: If your KPIs don't match ground truth, you're optimizing fiction. And fiction always catches up with you.

White Space: The Rarest Leadership Skill

Holger's final insight might be the most counterintuitive for modern business: Strategic breakthroughs don't happen during meetings. They happen during walks.

He describes a mentor who told his team: "You work too much. Next time you travel, block an afternoon. Go to a museum. Have coffee on company time. And figure things out."

In a culture that valorizes busyness as virtue, this sounds radical. But Holger is blunt: "If you keep solving problems, you're going to keep having problems to solve because you're never going to be able to take those two steps back to think it through properly."

His solution? Fake vacation days. Tell your office you're gone. Actually spend the afternoon reviewing contracts, auditing processes, thinking three moves ahead.

"You have to calm down," he says. "You have to take those steps back because that's when you get those ideas. That's when you figure out we've been doing this wrong all the time, or we could do it slightly differently and maybe increased our margin by 10 points instead of three."

Implications for Modern Organizations

If you're running a company in 2026, Holger's insights carry a specific challenge:

• Your contracts are not your agreements. They're your operating system for partnership. Are they designed for mutual value, or extraction?

• Your KPIs might be beautiful lies. Go check ground truth. The gap between metrics and reality is where your competitive advantage (or disaster) lives.

• AI governance is not compliance theater. Implement it early, cross-functionally, and as an enabler of faster, safer decisions.

• Automating inhuman work is humane. Automating human judgment is catastrophic. Know the difference.

• You can't think strategically while firefighting. Protect white space like you protect revenue.

• Your people are not a cost center. They're your competitive advantage. Design systems with them, not at them.

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How to reach out to Holger Carlsson?

If you want to talk to Holger he is incredible and a walking podcast. Reach out at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/holgeracarlsson/

Holger Carlsson is a Partner at Credo AI, focused on AI governance; Founder of Carson International; and former leader of IKEA's Southwest European supply chain operations. He works at the intersection of supply chain resilience, AI governance, and human-centric organizational design.

This interview is part of Codedesign's Voice of Experts series, exploring how leaders across industries are navigating the complexity of modern business transformation.

Have thoughts on human-centric AI, supply chain strategy, or leadership in the age of automation? Join the conversation in the comments or reach out to our team at contact@codedesign.org.

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