Empowering Product Stewardship with Expert Insight and AI

By Matt Kaiser, Director of Product Management

As emerging technologies reshape our world and unlock new opportunities, their successful adoption depends on understanding their real-world potential and navigating the complexities of deploying them for public use. Artificial intelligence (AI) is no different in this sense. Despite its promise of reducing costs or generating revenue for businesses, governments and organizations alike, it’s not magic. AI cannot deploy itself, at least not yet.

Our ULTRUS™ Product Stewardship software is founded on a simple principle: AI delivers the greatest value when guided by deep domain expertise. That’s why we’ve embedded our team’s regulatory and environmental knowledge directly into the model from the start, establishing a solid foundation for the tools and capabilities we’re developing. By combining advanced AI capabilities with our expert insight and robust data practices, we empower you to drive more agile, informed and resilient supply chain operations.

Deploying AI-powered applications requires careful consideration of the inputs provided to the model. Equally important is a thorough analysis of the outputs, which helps refine those inputs and guide the model toward desired outcomes. For example, if you’re using AI to classify product compliance risks, the quality of your training data, such as labeling accuracy and regulatory context, directly impacts the effectiveness of the model. That’s why it’s essential to clearly define the problem you aim to solve and establish a repeatable, objective framework for evaluating the model’s performance. Taking these steps early helps align your AI-assisted projects with clarity, purpose and measurable success.

Traditional approaches to supply chain management sometimes face challenges in meeting the demands of nuanced, high-level decision-making. In the past, only the most resource-rich organizations have been able to scale these tasks effectively. AI has emerged as a valuable tool for helping to address these complexities, enabling organizations to process and interpret vast amounts of data with greater speed and precision. Today, AI is leveling the playing field and opening doors to greater supply chain transparency and compliance, allowing everyone to benefit.

And no, it’s not about replacing the experts. It’s about giving them superpowers — automating the tedious stuff, making sense of massive amounts of data in real time, spotting risks before they become problems, and surfacing insights that help teams move faster and smarter. AI also helps predict disruptions before they hit and makes it easier for global teams to stay in sync with smart workflows and natural language tools.

Furthermore, history is filled with examples of organizations learning lessons too late. Supply chain challenges are often addressed reactively, only after significant safety violations or harm has already occurred to the environment and human health. In many cases, these negative impacts remain hidden for years before they’re fully identified and understood. For instance, the use of hazardous chemicals like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in manufacturing went unchecked for decades, leading to widespread contamination of water supplies. In the apparel industry, poor labor practices and unsafe working conditions have repeatedly come to light only after tragic events. Similarly, the lack of responsible mineral sourcing for electronics has fueled many environmental and human rights abuses, often without companies realizing the full extent of their supply chain exposure. These cases highlight the urgent need for proactive, data-driven approaches that can surface risks early before they escalate into crises.

With access to AI, today’s organizations have the opportunity to learn from the past and take action earlier, helping them mitigate costly risks. The challenge, however, is that much of an organization’s supply chain and product data remains fragmented, siloed and difficult to access, let alone capable of leveraging at scale.

Agentic platforms — technologies designed to automate and expand the reach of complex, repetitive tasks — are transforming how organizations prepare data for AI-enabled applications. Tasks like data onboarding and cleansing, once time-consuming and hard to scale, can now be handled more efficiently. For instance, an agentic platform can automatically ingest supplier data from multiple formats, standardize it and flag inconsistencies without manual oversight. These platforms create, manage and deploy autonomous AI agents capable of reasoning, planning and executing actions with minimal human intervention.

What sets agentic platforms apart is their ability to integrate human expertise while orchestrating tasks across fragmented systems. They enable seamless collaboration between AI and humans, making it easier to coordinate data across disconnected platforms and embed subject matter knowledge into critical processes. Within our ULTRUS™ Product Stewardship software, agentic capabilities play a key role in predicting supply chain compliance risks before they occur. We have also thoughtfully applied AI to address specific, compliance-related challenges across the product life cycle. By leveraging agentic automation, the platform streamlines complex tasks such as data integration, regulatory tracking and risk identification. These capabilities help our customers manage and secure even the most intricate supply chains. With ULTRUS™ software, companies can stay ahead of evolving compliance demands while scaling their expertise more effectively across teams and systems.

At UL Solutions, we understand that product stewardship is no longer just a compliance function — it’s a strategic imperative. With increasing regulatory complexity, rising stakeholder expectations and growing pressure to innovate responsibly, organizations need more than just tools; they need trusted partners.

Our ULTRUS™ Product Stewardship software is built to meet this moment. By combining deep regulatory expertise with advanced AI and agentic automation, our software empowers your teams to anticipate risk, streamline compliance and scale the impact across the product life cycle. We’re preparing your organization for what’s next.

Whether you’re a C-suite leader focused on resilience and growth or a product stewardship professional navigating the details of global compliance, UL Solutions is ready to help you lead with confidence, clarity and purpose.

Visit ul.com/software/ultrus/product-stewardship to learn more, or contact us to start a conversation about how we can support your goals.