Top 3 Manifest Takeaways - Day 3

Data as a Product (DaaP – yeah, more acronyms)

I hate to admit I had not considered treating data as a product until this week. ?While there are many versions of data platforms in the modern tech stack, their success all goes back to data integrity.?Instead of trying to enforce strict data standards upfront, which are difficult to maintain and often incomplete, companies should build systems that can ingest data in any format from any source (e.g., SAP, web UIs, spreadsheets). The system should then be able to process and align the data for use in operations.?

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Agents as a Capability (AaaC - ?)

Over the last three days, I have heard countless references to agentic AI. Using agents to connect the analog portions of the digital supply chain could unlock a step change in performance. The practitioner in me screams, “Prove it,” but where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

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The Surprise of Unsurprising Patterns

DeepSeek R1 was released last month and seemed to take the tech and policy community by surprise.? Why?? As Dave Clark pointed out in his excellent interview with Kevin O’Marah to kick off Day 3, this is a typical pattern in technology scaling. We’ve seen over and over how incremental improvements in efficiency and speed drive the widespread implementation of new technologies (this is the Amazon playbook!).

A related takeaway is that assuming the way organizations are solving a problem today is the only way to look at it.? You risk becoming the very best at a process that is no longer relevant.? I’m reminded of the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones casually shoots a sword-wielding attacker with his revolver.? ?

(Answer: When Dave Clark was at Amazon and found that traditional fulfillment networks broke under the volume of ?Amazon “eaches,” he found a different way to solve that problem, just like Indiana Jones.)?

Similarly, I had lunch with the founder of a company that hopes to revolutionize ocean transport and middle-mile delivery using blimps. This is an early stage with many visible and unforeseen challenges, but the implications were compelling. While many presenters at Manifest highlighted their solutions to the multiple digital and physical handoffs in supply chains,?this solution simply bypasses the handoffs?and flies the containers directly from Shenzhen to Walmart DC in Dallas.?

Many innovations can sound crazy...until they aren't!