Speed and Substance for Supply Chain Leaders in Davos

Six of the G7 leaders?skipped Davos this year, as have India’s Narendra Modi and China’s Xi Jinping. Together, these countries represent 63% of global GDP, so how can one call it the “World” Economic Forum with a straight face? Business Insider’s take on which topics would dominate discussion predicted a “three-way brawl between agentic AI, Trump's tariff talk, and crypto's regulatory tug-of-war,” suggesting less gravitas than such a high-profile gathering deserves. ?

And yet, there is real substance beneath the surface. For CSCOs and COOs, the top two takeaways are, first, that supply chain resilience now means agility in the face of political brinksmanship, as well as climate change;?and second, that AI is your new best friend.?

The Need for Speed

Donald Trump’s inauguration followed a rally the night before, where the forty-seventh US president promised to act with “historic speed.” That’s a big challenge for a global economy accustomed to long, lean supply chains and broad political agreement on the wisdom of free trade. Rising protectionism, geopolitical conflict, cyber insecurity, and surging temperatures have operations leaders looking for faster, better decision-making.?

The crowd in Davos was all over the idea of immediate action rather than talk. Kudos to Kearney for an aptly titled roundtable I was part of called “The Need for Speed: Adapting to Disruption, Risk, and Uncertainty in Global Supply Chains.”?

AI Has the Speed

AI is everywhere in Davos this week. Technology and consulting companies are featuring their stories on how AI can solve big global problems. Some?business leaders, however, are more focused on how?AI might drive revenue, including the challenge of monetizing IP baked into agents that automate the work of consultants, analysts, and other experts.?

Less obvious but more important for operations leaders is the use of proprietary chatbots and LLMs as a unifying layer on top of existing supply chain planning and execution systems. A recent HBR article based on Microsoft’s data center supply chain shows how generative AI allows natural language questions to interrogate planning data dynamically. ?

The big benefit is speed. High-stakes decision-making, especially?back-and-forth business debates on how to handle problems and maximize opportunities, can now happen in minutes rather than days or weeks. Automated explainability of the kind we expect from Chat GPT is what many CSCOs I’ve spoken to think is the unlock for true end-to-end agility. ?

Tariffs Will Test It

There is a lot of talk about Trump, tariffs, and trouble here at Davos, but operations people seem much less concerned than everyone else. Zero100 recently hosted a roundtable of two dozen supply chain executives on the topic and most said they felt ready to play the game as it unfolds. ?

Few, if any, are stockpiling inventory, and all are well down the road?diversifying supply sources geographically. Some are also actively engaging politicians and agencies for exemptions in the deal-oriented world now emerging. The bottom line is simple – lowest, risk-adjusted cost-to-serve is still the answer. Faster, more data-driven, and more explainable decision-making is the new face of supply chain agility.??

The Planet Needs It

With ESG in political disfavor, one might think sustainability in supply chains was passé. Not so. Every operations leader I’ve spoken to says their commitments are largely intact, although increasingly focused on cutting GHG emissions, which is ongoing work already tied to operating metrics. ??

Social justice, plastics reduction, and some other big-tent sustainability objectives may be quietly trimmed from supply chain leaders’ to-do lists, but not decarbonization. In fact, process data mining specialist Celonis hosted a session on the role of AI in accelerating decarbonization by using data in existing systems rather than pulling it all into a separate data lake. Faster and better. Thank goodness because recent data shows that we’ve breached the once-aspirational limit of 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial world.??

It's All On You

Davos this year felt weirdly disconnected from geopolitical power struggles playing out in capitols around the world. For supply chain leaders, however, the good news is that you’re already working on the right stuff to master AI and maybe save the world. ?

Just don’t wait for Washington, Beijing, or Brussels to lead.??