In today’s supply chain, a week is not merely a long time. It can be the difference between protecting margins and absorbing avoidable cost; maintaining availability and losing sales; or preserving customer trust and explaining why another commitment has been missed.
Geopolitical tensions, tariff changes, economic uncertainty and supplier instability are no longer occasional interruptions to an otherwise predictable operating environment.
They increasingly overlap, interact and move faster than traditional planning cycles.
Senior Industry Strategies Director – Retail & CPG at Blue Yonder.
The external risk picture supports that conclusion. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026 identifies geoeconomic confrontation as the leading risk for both 2026 and the period to 2028. Half of the experts surveyed expect the global outlook over the next two years to be turbulent or stormy.
This is creating a decision-speed challenge at the heart of global commerce.
Research with supply chain leaders, found that only 20% can develop and deploy a response to a geopolitical disruption within 24 hours. A further 38% require more than a week.
During those seven days, transport costs can change, capacity can disappear, inventory can become stranded and competitors can secure alternative sources of supply. By the time a response has passed through every functional review and approval, the original assumptions may already be obsolete.
The critical question is not whether an organization can see disruption. It is whether it can convert that signal into an executable enterprise decision while there is still time to influence the outcome.
Visibility is not the same as readiness
For many years, supply chain transformation focused on improving forecasts, optimizing individual functions and reducing cost. Those disciplines remain important, but many of the operating models surrounding them were designed for a more predictable world.
Today’s disruptions cut across procurement, manufacturing, logistics, inventory, commercial planning and finance simultaneously. Yet many organizations still manage them through separate systems, functional metrics and sequential decisions.
Consider a tariff change. It may require the business to reassess sourcing, production, inventory deployment, pricing, customer allocation and margin exposure. If each function develops its own answer before the enterprise reconciles the trade-offs, valuable time is lost.
A dashboard may reveal the disruption quickly, but it does not determine which customers to prioritize, what financial exposure is acceptable or who has the authority to act.
Visibility without decision rights is simply faster awareness of the same problem.
Confidence is becoming polarized
The research also reveals a decline in overall confidence. Only 66% of leaders now consider their supply chains ready for the future, compared with 73% in 2025.
46% describe themselves as highly optimistic about their supply chains. These leaders are also more likely to report shared cross-functional KPIs, integrated data and stronger end-to-end visibility.
Optimism itself does not create better performance. Rather, confidence appears to reflect the capabilities these organizations have already built.
Less optimistic organizations are 2.3 times more likely to experience slow data sharing and integration, 2.5 times more likely to operate in functional silos and four times more likely to describe their supply chains as disjointed.
The divide is therefore not simply technological. It is organizational and operational. Connected businesses are better positioned to develop a common understanding of events, evaluate enterprise-wide consequences and align teams around one response.
From unified data to unified decisions
Unified data platforms are now the most widely adopted new technology in the survey, deployed by 51% of organizations. Adoption rises to 64% among the more optimistic cohort, compared with 40% among less optimistic leaders.
That foundation is essential, but it is only the beginning.
The real value emerges when common data supports connected decisions across planning and execution. This enables organizations not only to identify disruption, but also to assess its end-to-end impact, evaluate alternative responses and orchestrate action across the network.
Technology provides the foundation, but achieving decision speed also requires shared enterprise outcomes, clearly defined decision ownership, agreed intervention thresholds, pre-modelled scenarios and the authority to act.
European businesses are already adapting. European Commission survey evidence found that 27% of EU firms had changed, or planned to change, their strategies in response to tensions, disruption or policy changes in foreign markets. Among those adapting, 38% were changing sourcing or destination countries, while 22% were increasing inventory buffers.
Resilience is no longer an abstract ambition. Businesses are actively reconfiguring supply networks—but every adjustment carries consequences for cost, working capital, service and risk. The faster those trade-offs can be understood across the enterprise, the more choices leaders retain.
In grocery and consumer goods, the response window is narrower still because shelf life, availability and promotional commitments leave little room for delay.
AI can accelerate decisions - but foundations determine value
AI will play an increasingly important role in reducing the time between signal, insight and action. Machine learning and predictive AI are already used by 45% of respondents, with another 29% implementing them. Generative AI adoption has doubled from 12% to 24%, while agentic AI remains at an earlier stage, with 8% reporting live deployment.
AI can continuously monitor conditions, identify exceptions, evaluate scenarios and recommend responses at a scale human teams cannot match. When connected to planning and execution, it can also help translate those decisions into coordinated action across the network.
However, autonomy is not a shortcut around unresolved transformation challenges. AI operating across fragmented data, conflicting objectives and unclear decision rights may accelerate activity without improving outcomes.
Before giving AI agents greater scope to act, leaders must be confident in the data, guardrails, accountability and operating model surrounding those decisions. The question is not simply, “Can the agent act?” It is: “Should it act, within what boundaries and in pursuit of which enterprise outcome?”
The new measure of resilience
No organization can predict every disruption. A more practical measure of resilience is how quickly the organization can understand what has changed, determine what matters, make the necessary trade-offs and mobilize a coordinated response.
That is the real 24-hour test.
The organizations pulling ahead are not simply those with more information. They are those that can connect intelligence, decisions and execution quickly enough to act while choices still exist.
In an increasingly volatile world, resilience will not be determined by who sees the disruption first. It will be determined by who can make - and execute -the best decision before the window to respond closes.
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