I came back from Gartner Supply Chain Symposium / Xpo 2026 with a notebook fuller than usual. The agenda was familiar. The conversations were not. I’ll be sharing four observations from the floor and conversations at our booth.
The AI conversation grew up
The AI questions I heard in Orlando were noticeably different this year. More specific and practical. Vague openers had given way to focused follow-ups about forecasting on noisy demand, the explainability of recommendations, the role of Large Language Model (LLM)-based assistants in the planner’s day.
This is what a cohort looks like after one full learning cycle. People have heard the pitches, watched a few deployments, and now understand the territory well enough to ask the right questions. The conversation has moved past whether AI belongs in supply chain planning, to what specifically it should do, and how to evaluate it.
Most of the capabilities they’re asking about are already shipping. The harder question now is how those capabilities get integrated into how planners actually work.
The questions I heard in Orlando were specific. Where does Machine Learning (ML) actually improve forecasting on noisy demand? Can Large Language Model (LLM)-based assistants shorten the path from question to answer? How explainable is the recommendation a planner is being asked to accept?These are practitioner questions. They reflect a cohort that has lived through enough vendor cycles to ask AI not what it can promise, but what it can ship. Probabilistic forecasting is in production. Multi-Echelon Inventory Optimization (MEIO) is in production. Conversational interfaces are real. The hard part is no longer the technology; it is the integration into how planners actually work.Our talk on risk as a first class variable was well attended. The follow up questions and long conversations at the booths were practical and invigorating.
The role of the planner is becoming more central, not less
A subtext beneath the AI conversation in Orlando was anxiety. Sometimes spoken. Often not. What does an AI-augmented planning function look like for the people who work in it today?
I do not share that anxiety. The change ahead is elevation, not erasure.
The repeatable, data-wrangling, plan-repair work that consumes a meaningful share of a planner’s week is exactly what AI and automation absorb best. What remains are the judgment calls, the postural choices, the conversations with operations and finance about what the business will commit to requires more human attention, not less.
The math gets done by the system. The decision still gets made by a person who understands the political, commercial, and operational stakes that no objective function can fully capture. The planning profession has a more interesting decade ahead of it than the one behind it.
The CFO is now part of the planning conversation
This one I expected. The depth of it surprised me. CFOs and chief operating officers were not just attending sessions. They were in active conversation with their supply chain counterparts about what resilience means as a measurable construct.
The questions are different at that altitude. Margin sensitivity under various scenarios. Working capital at risk as a quantified exposure. Service reliability as a contract-defensible posture.
The language is financial. The planning function that can speak it fluently will earn the next round of investment.
This is an unambiguously positive development. Supply chain planning has long been the operational discipline most underweighted relative to its impact. That is changing.
Where this leaves us
A few years ago, the question at Symposium was how planning would respond to more disruption. This year, the question was how planning gets redesigned for structural volatility. The methods exist. The mathematics exists. Increasingly, executive sponsorship exists.
What remains is the work of translating that into platforms practitioners can actually use, and partnerships that go beyond go-live.
Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth in Orlando.
Ask for a one-on-one demo of the Arkieva supply chain planning solution.
