Next Wave Digital: Tech-Ops Fusion for Troubled Times
100 COOs and CSCOs convened in Miami last week on the same day Trump’s most recent tariffs kicked in. Stock markets were spooked and attendees at Zero100 Forum scrambled to handle questions from CEOs and boards. It was an auspicious moment to reflect on how AI and supply chain digitization are preparing business to cope in troubled times.?
Top takeaway: Growth, margins, and resilience all depend on going deep with digital and pivoting faster than you may think possible toward technology and operations fusion. ?
Agentic AI, robotics, and data-as-a-product are hot, but without the ability to make change go viral, many organizations won’t survive the current chaos in supply chain management. ?
Three Levers to Win Next Wave Digital?
Distilling 28 practitioner session topics, ranging from digital-first org designs and system-level robotics to data-rich tech platforms and e-commerce upheaval, three leadership levers emerged as essential to delivering fast business value from digital:?
Zero100’s data science team analyzed ~25 million data points (job descriptions, earnings calls, bills-of-lading, patent filings, AI case studies, etc) from 285 companies to calculate how much difference these three levers made between 2022 and 2025. We identified two dozen characteristics visible in companies engaging with all three levers, with the top quartile demonstrating leadership across all of them.
This top quartile was able to grow revenue 31% faster than the overall group average, which is 4x more than leaders focused only on tech. They also did better with inventory efficiency and grew margins by 250 basis points. Maybe most impressive, however, was their performance on earnings per share (EPS) estimate accuracy, which is a measure of visibility and resilience. Top quartile exemplars of the three levers saw 44% more accurate EPS estimates than the average.?
Digital done right is faster, more flexible, and more precise than old-school tech built by IT and thrown over the wall to operations. During a week dominated by trade war escalation, this conclusion was encouraging news for operations leaders expected to have answers about what needs to happen next.?
How About the Tariffs??
Next wave digital is our day job, so we were ready with lots of details on where agentic AI is taking root (everywhere), how many robots per 1,000 operations employees is normal (61.9), and when to add SVP-level software expertise to your leadership team (now). The curveball was starting our event early with dedicated workshops focused on Trump’s tariffs, some of which went into effect that very morning.?
Forty attendees from every industry imaginable and around the world shared their latest views on what to expect from the US and its trading partners, plus what each is doing to handle the uncertainty (see our Zero100 Tariff Playbook below). ?
First, the bad news: Trade war is unavoidable. Hopes that talk out of Washington was posturing have faded, even though some deals are being struck. We’re in it, and the universal consensus is that prices will need to go up. It’s time to start communicating where costs will impact prices and working with commercial teams to soften the blow on customers.?
Next, the good news: Supply chain leaders are ready. De-risking China supply is an old idea in our circles. We’ve been gathering tier N supplier data, building relationships, and running scenarios for years, and most are well on the road to local and/or regional supply networks. Add explosive innovation in materials science and robotics, and many supply chain organizations are reasonably well-positioned to reshore some manufacturing despite high labor costs. ?
Lean Into the Change?
Some might be tempted to tune out the chaos and wait for calm. Bad idea. Technology is accelerating while politics fractures in search of popular traction. There is no going back.?
History (and shareholders!) will reward leaders who manage to seize opportunities created by the shake-up and create new tools and talent to win the future.?
Don’t blink.?