Back at the Blue Yonder ICON event in May of 2025, CEO Duncan Angove announced the delivery of Cognitive Solutions—a major shift that signaled a new era for the supply chain.
At ICON 2026, Angove took the evolution one step further by introducing Frictionless Outcomes, an entirely new way of thinking about solutions implementation and time-to-value.
Until recently, enterprise software took anywhere from six months to over a year to deploy. What’s worse: after deployment, companies struggled to realize the value they were promised at the time of purchase. Those timelines aren’t tenable for today’s supply chains that require speed, precision, and agility to respond to market changes.
Since the launch of Cognitive Solutions, we’ve seen transformations across every sector and knew there had to be a more efficient way to help our customers reach their goals. Rather than trying to optimize a process that wasn’t working, Blue Yonder reimagined the very foundation. We asked ourselves how deployment could be different, particularly with the help of AI and agentic AI. What are the blockers to maximizing value upfront, sustaining it, and consistently growing that value over time?
The old deployment model is organized around work: tasks, plans, and deliverables across an extended timeframe. The new model is organized around outcomes. Achieving Frictionless Outcomes requires letting go of what has always been, focusing on doing what’s best for the customer, and allowing technology to collapse unnecessary complexity.
Let’s dig into what all of this means for our customers.
What is Frictionless Outcomes?
In the simplest terms, the Frictionless Outcomes manifesto is our commitment to speed up time-to-value and enable continuous improvement for our customers through AI agents and other tools across the entire software lifecycle. Currently, human-powered services support these steps. We believe it should be a product feature—purpose-built agents that can support initial deployment through upgrades and continuous business value maximization.
Additionally, every major agent deployment at Blue Yonder includes Forward Deployed Engineers. These agents work directly inside customer operations, alongside planners, operators, supervisors, and the logistics team, to turn real operational behavior into agentic intelligence.
Each action, each input helps agents learn, not just the workflow, but how the business and the supply chain run. Just as people increase their efficiency as they gain more experience, so too do the agents. And the agents work at machine speed and at scale.
Why now?
While at ICON, Angove was clear about why Blue Yonder feels comfortable disrupting a $480 billion industry to make system integrations a product feature, rather than a necessary role for companies.
Angove’s take on this was refreshingly transparent: “We believe it's going to happen anyway. We'd much rather do this and allow customers to deploy faster and consume more. The biggest barrier to buying software is the cost of deploying it.”
Innovation cannot maintain the status quo. Blue Yonder’s obligation to our customers is to anticipate where supply chain technology is going and do whatever it takes to get them there. Right now, that means using agentic AI to ensure customers can deploy as soon as possible.
While it might be bold to others, doing the right thing for our customers is an obvious choice. And the results speak for themselves. One customer, for example, saw accuracy double within a 72-hour window, despite working in a notoriously difficult industry to forecast. Less waste, more accuracy, and a better supply chain for everyone.
Building a collaborative supply chain with new metrics
When the vision for Frictionless Outcomes materialized, we also identified another obstacle. When employees hear about advancements in AI, they tend to assume that it will result in job losses.
Angove explained that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the impact agentic AI has on the supply chain. He said, “When it comes to AI and Agents, we believe people are focused on the wrong unit of transformation. The question shouldn’t be ‘How many planners or logistics coordinators can we replace with agents?’ That is the wrong unit. The question should be ‘How can we use AI and Agents to drive better business outcomes? What does it allow us to do that we couldn’t before?”
Answers won’t come quickly or easily. Workers and leadership across the supply chain will need to rethink how they interact with supply chain software, agentic AI, and each other. Companies must think beyond silos and at the system level about how to combine human strategy with the speed and efficiency of AI to create a supply chain that hasn’t been possible until now.
With this new interface, the human works alongside the agents in the app. They can use the agents in a side-pane conversation or forgo the app entirely and work directly with the agents. Activities such as realm provisioning, data migration, user workflow migration, and others are becoming more automated[PH1.1], cutting time-to-value by 87% in some cases.
A note on customer readiness
Although these fundamental changes in supply chain technology are necessary to meet today’s market demands, some companies still hesitate to make the shift to Cognitive Solutions. We get it. It’s true that a transformation this comprehensive shouldn’t be taken lightly.
It is also true that rethinking everything gives us the opportunity to create something better.
For example, planning is a function born from human capabilities and limitations. To keep costs down and reduce waste, we had to figure out a way to plan for the most likely future demand. But with agentic AI, planning becomes something entirely new. The agents are constantly working, collecting and reviewing data, recalling past trends, and taking action. Long lead times vanish.
In this new reality, planners can address the bigger picture. Of course, that means the human impact across the supply chain will change. Roles will evolve and new ways of driving value will arise.
If it seems a bit overwhelming right now, don’t worry. Blue Yonder has advisors, agents, and partners ready to help you make the transition from the past to a future of Frictionless Outcomes.
Learn more about Blue Yonder’s Cognitive Solutions
To learn more about Blue Yonder’s Cognitive Solutions and how we can help you increase accuracy, improve performance, and reduce waste, check out our solutions page. Also, check out some of our customers and their proven success strategies.