Whatever turbulence the wider economy is experiencing, supply chain teams feel a sharper, more immediate version of it. Supply chains are physical and slow to reconfigure, so a shift in policy or conditions in one corner of the economy shows up as an operational problem within days.
For most of the supply chain leaders we talk to, the volatility is now the baseline, and they're rebuilding their operations to match in real time. That work centers on anticipation: building systems that pick up disruption signals early and respond before the impact hits.
What proactive looks like, and how AI makes it possible
Reacting to disruption and anticipating it are meaningfully different capabilities. A supply chain built to react can be very good at it. But even with a strong team and a well-oiled process, the company still absorbs the negative impacts (just more efficiently than the next company over).
Anticipation works differently. It starts before the disruption is visible to most of the organization, with signals picked up from across the network, like sudden oil price hikes or a weather pattern that will shift transit times. Anticipatory supply chain systems respond while there's still time to choose the best and cheapest fix. That might mean repositioning inventory ahead of a likely shortage, or qualifying a backup supplier before the primary one fails.
The volume of these signals has grown faster than any human (or team of humans) can keep up with, and that gap is where most reactive supply chains lose their margin. AI makes acting earlier practical at the scale modern supply chains require. A planner reviewing forecasts manually can spot a few risks. But when your system can continuously scan for issues across thousands of SKUs and hundreds of nodes, you’ll be able to spot many more.
Blue Yonder’s Supply Chain Compass 2026 research found that supply chain leaders with fully deployed AI are meaningfully more prepared for geopolitical risk than those without it because they see what’s coming more clearly.
Visibility is the foundation
A supply chain stitched together from disconnected systems can't act early because the relevant information doesn't reach the right place in time. By the time a tariff shifts or a supplier disruption is visible to the planner who needs to act, the window for the most economical response has already closed.
But systems that provide end-to-end visibility not only give you options you wouldn’t have known about before, but also more time to implement them. For example, when early signals suggest a key supplier is about to miss a delivery, the planning team now has time to pull forward inventory from another node or adjust the production schedule to use what's on hand. In traditional low-visibility systems, you only know the issue when the delivery fails to arrive, and by then, the only options left are expedited freight or a missed customer commitment.
Less waste, by design
Most of the waste in a supply chain is the result of decisions made too late. Consider markdowns. By the time a retailer can see clearly which stores are overstocked and which are running short, the selling season is usually too far along to redistribute inventory between locations and still sell it at full price. Transferring stock at that point costs more in freight and labor than the eventual markdown would, so the cheapest remaining option is to discount the overstocked stores to clear what's there before the season ends.
Besides the financial cost, waste creates an environmental cost, too. Take emissions. Air freight emits roughly 40 times more carbon per ton-mile than ocean freight, which means that every shipment moved by plane because it missed its window on the ground carries an emissions cost well beyond the financial one. The same logic applies to overproduced inventory and unplanned reroutes: each one represents physical movement or material that wouldn't have existed if the original decision had been better informed.
Resilience is the goal
Of course, no one system or one business can eliminate the global economic uncertainties we’re living through right now. And the forces driving today's volatility will keep reshaping the operating environment in ways no model can fully predict. But having a supply chain system that allows you to absorb disruption while finding advantage in those conditions puts you ahead of competitors that are less prepared to navigate these shifts quickly.
The good news is that end-to-end, AI-powered systems exist, and many of the leaders we work with are already operating this way. The Compass 2026 report calls these Optimistic supply chain leaders, and they’re the ones investing most heavily in platform-based architectures, unified data, and practical AI. Their confidence is grounded in being better positioned to act proactively in the conditions everyone else is also navigating before the disruption forces their hand.
Uncertainty is the environment everyone is operating in now. The companies that build for it are the ones finding success within it.
