It’s been an energizing first day of ICON 2025. Blue Yonder CEO Duncan Angove took the Main Stage in Nashville by storm, introducing a new era in supply chain management, characterized by unparalleled speed and precision.
In case you missed it, these are the key takeaways and announcements from the ICON 2025 Main Stage.
Ushering in a new dawn of technology
Move beyond boundaries. It’s not just Blue Yonder’s new tagline – it’s a promise fulfilled with the announcement of the Next Generation Cognitive Solutions.
As Duncan explained, Cognitive Solutions are intelligent systems that bring together separate workflows into a single unified decision framework. They make the process more intelligent and precise, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions natively built in, they unlock machine speed, greater precision and unmatched intelligence in your supply chain, transforming how we approach supply chain management.
It’s not about upgrading technology. It’s not just having faster, more efficient and precise processes – it’s about changing how we think about supply chain management and having solutions that think and work alongside us.
"We believe that combining GXO’s global scale and logistics expertise coupled with Blue Yonder’s state-of-the-art supply chain technology stack will provide unmatched services and capabilities to our customers and support the growth of both of our companies.”
Nizar Trigui, Chief Technology Officer at GXO
Introducing the 7 design pillars shaping Cognitive Solutions
After three years of innovation, $2 billion investment, the hard work of 1000s of first-class engineers and 100s of patents, and a vast array of strategic development partnerships, the new Blue Yonder Cognitive Solutions are here.
Going into a little more detail behind the groundbreaking work, Duncan introduced the 7 design pillars that shaped the Cognitive solutions.
- 1. Cloud native: Cognitive solutions are modern, meaning they’re built on the latest technology and designed natively for the cloud, making them infinitely scalable, highly secure, more resilient, and always current with the latest functionality.
- 2. AI Data Cloud & Blue Yonder Platform: Cognitive Solutions are built on the Snowflake data cloud, and the Blue Yonder Platform. This only has to ingest data once and can accurately run dozens of scenarios concurrently in minutes. By making data easier to find, faster to connect to, smarter to query, and more consistent across the organization, our new Cognitive Solutions can generate insights and answer complex questions at 100x machine speed and precision. Even better, the cloud model also enables any new capabilities to be deployed in all applications automatically.
- 3. Interoperable Solutions: Fundamental to agility is a cohesive set of supply chain management capabilities deployed on a common Blue Yonder platform and AI data cloud with end-to-end interoperability and orchestration. Enabling real-time visibility to disruption and opportunity, our interoperable solutions better manage dependencies and provide the agility to orchestrate multiple business functions simultaneously for faster and better decision making.
- 4. Multi-enterprise Network: The Blue Yonder Network connects every trading partner—manufacturer, retailer, and carrier—on a single, real-time platform. This means one single version of the truth for supply chain which means no more silos, no more lag. All capabilities are extended across multiple enterprises and tiers in a supply chain for better visibility, more precise decisions, and faster coordination and collaboration.
- 5. Unified Decisioning: Unified decision-making doesn’t just connect these separate systems, but also orchestrates decisions across the entirety. Every single decision is made with complete, real-time information across the entire supply chain, serving the business as a whole. Blue Yonder was able to unify 28 different planning applications, all on different data silos and architectures and rewrote them into one cohesive solution on one, single data model and platform.
- 6. Intelligent & Agentic: Connected to Blue Yonder’s Generative AI-powered BY Orchestrator, the Cognitive solutions have digital intelligence trained on the supply chain that can see, analyze, decide, and act at machine speed and precision.
- 7. Reimagined Experiences: Blue Yonder have undergone a complete overhaul to the user experience. Starting from the bottom up, the new Blue Yonder platform accounts for the complexities of what you do and gives you the ability to navigate and use dense data in a clean, easy to use design.
Introducing the first-ever planogram model and Agentic AI Agents
“Today we’re entering the next chapter, where we automate not just tasks, but decisions, and outcomes.”
Duncan Angove, Blue Yonder CEO
Chris Burchett, Blue Yonder’s SVP of Generative AI, joined Duncan on stage to look in-depth into the Agentic AI behind the cognitive solutions.
To start, he pointed out that Blue Yonder currently operates over 25 billion supply chain intelligence operations every day. To put it in perspective, every day Google runs about 8.5 billion searches worldwide. That means Blue Yonder is running 3 times as many Supply Chain intelligence operations as Google runs searches.
And now Blue Yonder is changing the game, with the launch of the Industry’s First Fine Tuned Supply Chain Model, the first ever large planogram model.
The announcements didn’t stop there. As well as the planogram model, Chris also announced a team of Agentic Agents, including:
- Shelf Ops Agent, which will enable leveraging our new Large Planogram Model a whole new level of speed and precision for Category Management.
- Warehouse Ops Agent, which will fully brief you on the challenges for the day across picking, labor and inventory.
- Inventory Ops Agent, which will quickly explain unmet demands and identify broken Bill Of Materials (BOM)s or other data quality issues.
- Network Ops Agent, which provides continuous network monitoring based on predictive issue detection and impact analysis to stay ahead of disruptions.
- Logistics Ops Agent, which is an intelligent analyst that provides deep, actionable insights into your transportation plans to unlock hidden bottom-line improvements.
We announced our AI Advisory, designed to get customers successfully running agents for their organization in 6-12 weeks, ensuring customers maximize the benefits, speed, and precision of the Blue Yonder Platform and Cognitive Solutions. The AI Advisory will also work with the Microsoft AI Co-Innovation Labs to co-innovate groundbreaking AI supply chain solutions to tackle the world’s most challenging supply chain issues.
Blue Yonder has reimagined User Experience
Nunzio Esposito, Chief Design Officer at Blue Yonder, joined Duncan on the Main Stage to talk about how Blue Yonder has reimagined user experience. We have improved the overall UX, but also included more and better collaboration ability.
And all of Blue Yonder solutions will be native on the desktop – Mac and Windows OS – as well as native on mobile, which will be further integrated into Co-pilot and Apple Intelligence. In addition, Nunzio also announced an entirely new class of Cognitive Mobile Apps, including apps for Replenishment, Warehouse Management, MerchOps, Manufacturing, and Space Planning. The apps will also be extensible, meaning that you can also add to and even make your own for a truly human first experience.
We launched Supply Chain Manager to advance our journey to Sustainable Abundance
Finally, Saskia van Gendt, Chief Sustainability Officer at Blue Yonder also joined Duncan on stage to talk about the mission to usher in the age of sustainable abundance.
“We believe that when you bring together the right people, technology, and expertise—you can change the world.”
Duncan Angove, Blue Yonder CEO
Our products help customers reduce waste and emissions every day. But there was a gap that needed filling. Customers need highly accurate and accredited reporting to meet the growing pressures they’re facing to meet their sustainability goals and regulatory pressures.
This brings us to the last announcement of the day – the launch of Blue Yonder Sustainable Supply Chain Manager which integrates ESG Datasets into the Blue Yonder data model so you can measure, manage and optimize carbon and waste alongside cost and service levels. The acquisition of Pledge Earth Technologies, a sustainable tech company helping businesses measure and meet their emission reduction goals, helps us move faster.
