Blue Yonder ICON 2026 is officially in full swing and we couldn’t be more thrilled.
The goal of this year’s ICON was clear: to prove that the vision we unveiled last year is more than just an idea. It’s a future-proof framework that has proven results for the supply chain. With the help of our customers and strategic partners, we did just that.
To learn more about how end-to-end cognitive solutions are transforming today’s most efficient supply chains, here’s a full recap of highlights and important announcements.
Optimizing for holistic business goals, not single steps
Blue Yonder CEO, Duncan Angove, took the stage to deliver the opening keynote to the score of Inception, a movie about invention driven by the need to sync various timelines happening simultaneously. The tone was set perfectly.
Duncan was joined by Simon Roberts, CEO of Sainsbury’s, to discuss how Blue Yonder’s cognitive solution is an important part of “building our strength and capabilities we’ll need for the future.”
Sainsbury’s started with an ambitious goal: to make good food joyful, accessible, and affordable. To accomplish this, the team invested in technology built to reduce waste, improve accuracy and availability, and simplify operations for team members.
As Simon said, “Not because using new tech was a goal, but because of the powerful outcomes we wanted to drive. Better availability, lower waste, simpler processes for colleagues, better partnering with suppliers, and, most importantly, to show up brilliantly for our customers every day.”
The results showed that Simon and his team made the right call. They saw:
- Improved availability while reducing stock through more accurate forecasting and replenishment decisions.
- Reduced waste at scale through accurate ordering and allocation that drove 150,000 fewer disposals and 800,000 fewer markdowns during their peak in 2025.
- A more resilient supply chain by reducing operational incidents and contingency reliance and embedded simulation to de-risk key trading events like Christmas.
- A single forecasting and replenishment platform across SKUs on one end-to-end platform.
- Digitization of category management to improve decision quality, productivity, and alignment between commercial and supply chain execution.
If these are the metrics we can all expect in the future of supply chain, we can’t wait.
The people are critical to the future of supply chain technology
Next, Duncan spoke with Paul Graham, Group CEO and Managing Director of Australia Post about what happens when a company focuses on the customer’s needs and delivering excellence no matter what.
The mission for Paul and his team was to completely overhaul a 217-year-old postal operation to meet the demands of a modern Australia. As a critical piece of national infrastructure, the team had a responsibility to prepare logistics, transportation, and warehousing for the future.
What’s more, Australia Post needed to prepare their workforce for the shift. Without an engaged, highly-trained workforce, the technology investments weren’t going to create the customer experience they needed to build.
As Paul said, “We were transforming from whiteboards and nameplates to AI-powered solutions and robotics. To do that well, you’ve got to take the people with you.” So, his team crafted a program, specifically designed to train their employees see the necessity for change, and get excited about the technologies that would power their everyday tasks.
Paul said that he knew they were successful in communicating the urgent need for change when he walked through the facilities and heard associates talk about being ready to turn left towards the future, instead of right towards more of the same.
The conversation was an important moment, not only to prove that enthusiastic transformation is possible even for companies that are over a century old, but also to remind everyone in the room that putting people first is the best way to ensure an efficient, AI-powered supply chain.
The new frontier of supply chain is AI
Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft Commercial Business, joined Duncan next to discuss how the partnership between Microsoft and Blue Yonder is setting the stage for the next decade of the supply chain.
Judson said that AI data centers will become defining infrastructure of the next decade. A partnership with Blue Yonder is a strategic investment to get the data center infrastructure online faster. Without a strong, reliable supply chain, that can’t happen.
But the partnership is about more than just business strategy. As we’ve learned all day, the right partners need to align on more than just technology. Judson mentioned that the three main values that Microsoft and Blue Yonder share, customer-first, innovation-led, and operating with trust are what make the partnership successful today and into the future. We couldn’t agree more!
Announced: The Model Training Factory from Blue Yonder and NVIDIA
Towards the closing of an exceptional keynote Duncan noted, “The generic Frontier models, like Claude and Gemini, are incredibly powerful, but supply chain is not a generic reasoning problem. It is a deeply operational environment with hard constraints, real-time execution, physical consequences, extreme scale, and thousands of interconnected decisions happening continuously across warehouses, transportation networks, suppliers, stores, and factories.”
A complex, ever-evolving challenge like that requires a sophisticated, ever-evolving solution.
Enter: The Model Training Factory. A new class of intelligence that is operationally fluent in supply chain management.
Duncan announced that this new initiative in partnership with NVIDIA is aimed to create intelligent AI agents trained to execute at the level of subject matter experts across the supply chain.
Built on NVIDIA Nemotron, the Model Training Factory generates AI models that perform high-value tasks at the level of supply chain subject matter experts and are designed to execute complex, multi-step supply chain workflows autonomously. After the models complete the workflows, they are then graded to ensure the highest quality outcomes.
These models will power the next generation of Blue Yonder agents across all major domains of the supply chain through a repeatable Model Training Factory designed to continuously produce, evaluate, refine, and orchestrate supply chain intelligence at scale.
The first day of Blue Yonder ICON 2026 concluded with this insight that cognitive solutions aren’t the future of supply chain—they are the technology that companies need to be efficient, successful, and sustainable right now. Reflecting on the innovative spirit of our Day 1 speakers, plus the power and potential of the features announced, we can’t wait to see what Day 2 reveals about the future of supply chain. Stay tuned!
