Looking back, this year has really highlighted the importance of resilience and reaction time. 2025 served up an ever-changing mix of supply chain disruptions, changes and opportunities.
Reflecting on the year allows us to understand how supply chains have been challenged, how to become more resilient and respond most effectively to all these disruptions, and where the focus might be for 2026. It also shows how supply chains are changing with the times, as they are reshaped by events like those of 2025.
Let's examine the pivotal stories of 2025 and the lasting impacts they will have on the industry.
A new trade landscape
It was always going to be top of the list. With the announcement of a new tariff approach, the U.S. made a drastic change of course on trade policy, and this continued to evolve over the course of 2025.
The introduction and adjustment of tariffs, both specific and wide-ranging, sent immediate ripples through global supply chains. As they began to be enacted, tariffs increased the cost of goods and materials, forcing many organizations to reevaluate their sourcing decisions, production arrangements, and partnerships.
“With all the chaos induced by tariffs, leaders' focus has been wrenched from their most important tasks—business strategy, innovation, driving key initiatives, and making important operational decisions. Now it is redirected to dealing with the bureaucracy, fallout and subsequent uncertainty of tariffs.”
Puneet Saxena corporate vice president, industry strategy
As the picture continues to shift with new sector-specific and country-specific measures being variously announced, delayed, altered, or implemented, there’s still considerable uncertainty for supply chain operators to navigate.
Geopolitical and economic policies have always shaped supply chains, but they are now driving supply chain strategy changes on a much shorter timeframe than we’re used to. Businesses are seeking certainty in order to make the right structural bets in the medium- to long-term. Strategies to mitigate the impacts include supplier and production diversity, nearshoring, and “friendshoring” (i.e., relocating production or fabrication to nations with beneficial tariff and political status).
Regulations reverse and sustainability splits
A theme across the year has been the shifting regulatory landscape in the U.S., which has seen consequential changes across the board, from bans on specific food ingredients all the way to the full restructuring of governmental departments like Health and Human Services. That shift has been exemplified in sustainability.
What’s complex to manage is the sometimes-contrasting directions of travel between state and federal government. Starting the year, the U.S. announced its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and its emissions reduction goals, once again stepping away from the centerpiece of global climate action collaboration. Following on, departments like the Environmental Protection Agency undid controls on methane emissions.
At the state level, however, influential states like New York and California are advancing new sustainability measures like new emissions reporting rules and zero-emission vehicle mandates. It’s not just happening in one or two powerful states though. Alliances between states are also driving climate and sustainability-related actions, with the Climate Alliance between governors of 24 states and territories aiming to introduce policies that reduce emissions, improve air quality, and more.
On top of that, Europe and China recommitted in July 2025 to collaborate on low-carbon technologies and the transition toward clean energy, so that while the U.S. diverges, other global powers continue to power forward with sustainability action.
“In the U.S., Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws are expanding, with new rules in California targeting textile and apparel waste.
“Looking ahead, additional EU measures coming into effect by 2027 will restrict vague green claims and require clear information on product repairability and lifespan. Taken together, these developments reflect a broader regulatory shift: Businesses must now redesign products and processes for sustainability, with full supply chain accountability.”
Saskia van Gendt, chief sustainability officer
Key global trade chokepoints: Instability and weather
In 2024, we saw events like the Francis Scott Key bridge collapse in Baltimore and the Panama Canal placing restrictions on ship numbers due to drought, causing significant disruption to shipping lanes. 2025 brought more global trade disruptions, both to key locations and key materials.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, ongoing conflict stepped up a level in January 2025 with the capture of Goma by rebel forces. This significantly disrupted trade in key minerals used in industries like electronics, automobiles, aerospace, and tool making.
Global shipping was again hit by disruption and delay as the Houthi movement in Yemen began a blockade of the straits leading to the Red Sea and the Suez canal, causing massive disruption to the main shipping lane between Asia and Europe.
And in the Philippines, South China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, Super Typhoon Ragasa saw shipping ports closed and some of the densest manufacturing regions in the world shut down. The storm damaged power supplies and made travel unsafe, resulting in loss of production and shipping delays.
“Climate change undeniably affects supply chains. In 2023, the U.S. experienced 28 natural disasters that cost a whopping $1 billion each. Around the world, agriculture is suffering under natural disasters and extreme weather….The realities of today’s business environment introduce an untold number of variables to supply chains. But this doesn’t mean teams have to accept subpar planning frameworks or outcomes. How can they filter out the noise, achieve clarity, and be more agile and resilient? This is where multi-enterprise supply chain networks come into play.”
Duncan Angove, chief executive officer
The rate of weather and climate-related events like these super-storms (or wildfires, as seen in California in January 2025) is increasing, posing severe risks to supply chains. Having detailed scenario plans in place to respond to these large-scale disruptions is essential for managing supply chains today. The challenge is for supply chain leaders to build in agility in their businesses, so that when the time comes they’re able to quickly enact those scenario plans across their supply chain network.
Labor challenges
In June 2025, there were 11 simultaneous strikes in ports, railways, customs, and parcel delivery around the world, causing massive disruption within the directly affected countries and beyond.
Domestically, provisional numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that large strikes (defined as work stoppages involving more than 1,000 employees) are happening at an increased rate in 2025, with this year seeing the joint highest rate of labor disruptions for 25 years, matched only by 2023. In supply chains, major strikes like those threatened at the ports of Los Angeles and Rotterdam particularly focused on guarantees that jobs would not be automated.
“Today, only 25% of supply-chain leaders see automation as a top priority; just 4% aspire to fully automate their operations; and a mere 1% expect automation to drive headcount reductions. The warehouses of the future, it turns out, will still need people.
“The reality is that rigid, mechanistic approaches to warehouse management are too brittle for our complex and volatile world. The supply chains of the future will need to be powered not by clockwork, but by cognition”
Gurdip Singh, chief product officer
At the same time, in August the U.S. economy added just 22,000 jobs, highlighting a weak labor market, in which hiring and retaining crucial supply chain workers should theoretically be easier. However, with uncertainty around the wider economy as well as tariff rates, businesses may be deferring hiring drives until they have greater clarity.
AI overdrive and agents come online
This has been the year of AI adoption. Hype around large language models has been around for a few years since the explosive launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, but supply chains were largely restricted to piloting and testing new AI tools and features—until 2025. In the Blue Yonder Supply Chain Compass spotlight on technology, we learned that almost half of supply chains now run predictive AI or machine learning (ML), and only 16% had no plans to implement AI or ML. 40% of leaders surveyed said that AI is now changing how they operate.
It's also been the year in which AI models progressed rapidly, but perhaps the single biggest AI news of the year was the January launch of DeepSeek R-1. Trained at far lower cost and with less computing power than competitor models, but with comparable performance, the Chinese market entrant shook U.S. AI dominance briefly, and showed how quickly the field is still evolving.
Within the AI space, agentic has been a contender for word of the year. AI agents allow models to reason on business data and connect to existing tech stacks, giving them the power to not just provide visibility, but also recommend and take actions. That model has proved compelling, as 43% of businesses have fully or broadly adopted AI agents, according to pwc.
“As early adopters lean in and bring agentic teammates on board, they’ll make their human counterparts faster, more efficient, and more accurate as they respond to day-to-day needs. Over the next 12- to 24-months, more tasks will be delegated to agents. Eventually, agents will be used more autonomously, increasing the speed of decision-making and resilience of supply chains.”
Chris Burchett, senior vice president, generative AI
The supply chain paradigm is shifting
The events of 2025 were more than just a series of isolated crises and trends; they were interconnected challenges and technological leaps that collectively argue for a fundamental rethinking of supply chain management.
As disruption events become more common and more impactful, as supply chains become more and more complex, 2025 showed us that we’re reaching the limits of human ability to respond effectively to the challenges. What it also showed us is that new technologies like agentic AI are not just theoretically capable, but practically tested and proven.
Supply chains used to build technology around their teams, giving each of them a tool for a specific job. At first, those software tools lived on the premises, then we lifted them to the cloud, but the shape and nature of the tools didn’t meaningfully change. Each tool still worked to its own ends and in its own world.
That has always limited supply chain management as a discipline. As good it sounds in theory to operate close to real time—to share information, to collaborate, to be agile—in practice, there are hard limits to how fast and how far that technological architecture can react and reach.
That is why Blue Yonder is building and deploying Cognitive Solutions, a suite of supply chain tools on a shared platform. It’s why there’s now widespread demand for enterprise-wide, platform-based solutions, with 90% of surveyed leaders saying they would benefit from one.
We can’t predict the future exactly, but it’s a safe bet that 2026 will see the continuation of many of these trends, and keep us busy with new disruptions too. Meeting the moment requires a new approach to supply chain management, one that gives businesses greater control over their supply chains. Achieving that requires scale, speed and end-to-end connection beyond what’s been traditionally possible—but if there’s one thing 2025 should teach supply chains, it’s that a lot can change very quickly.
