Tariffs, AI, Supply Chain Design: Post Gartner Symposium Thoughts

Earlier this week, I split my time at the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium between attending sessions and representing Decision Spot at our booth. It was a great mix of absorbing ideas, listening to industry leaders, and conversing with supply chain professionals from various industries.

Here are a few things that stood out to me:

1. Tariffs Are Top of Mind

Tariffs were the hot topic on nearly everyone’s mind. Ken Chadwick from Gartner addressed this in his keynote, urging supply chains to look into reconfiguring their networks (what I heard as “supply chain design”) and strengthening partnerships.

I also had a great conversation with a leader in the electronics manufacturing industry, which reminded me of my early days working at an automobile OEM. Switching suppliers in complex manufacturing isn’t easy. Suppliers are often qualified to produce on specific lines after a rigorous development and testing process. Line setups are costly, and OEMs typically absorb this fixed investment.

So, when you have to change countries and the flow of products due to tariffs, your options are limited. You might need the same supplier to move operations to a new plant in a different country, or you’ll have to go through the lengthy process of qualifying a new one. That’s not a quick switch.

In industries like apparel, where supplier switching is relatively less cumbersome, there's often less financial buffer to absorb margin hits. Each industry faces different challenges, but none are spared from disruption.

In the end, supply chains have to find an answer that is not just optimal, but also robust, factoring in supplier relationships, capabilities and capacities, and all buckets of cost, not just tariffs. And when you’re doing this at an enterprise scale, across thousands of SKUs, bills of materials, and alternate materials, it quickly becomes a math problem. More specifically, an optimization problem. Not something you can solve in a spreadsheet.

The takeaway: those who have invested in continuous supply chain design processes, or are actively building them, will be far better prepared. In a turbulent environment, that becomes a real strategic advantage.

2. Disruptions Are Getting Faster (and So Must We)

Tariffs are just one disruption among many that supply chains have dealt with in recent years. Peter Hinssen, a serial entrepreneur and author, delivered a powerful keynote titled “The Never Normal,” packed with insights on the accelerating pace of change. A few thoughts that stuck with me:

• “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it’s acting with yesterday’s logic, data, or tools.”

  
  

• From Mark Zuckerberg: “In today’s game, speed is not an option. It is the strategy.

  
  

• “If you want to connect the dots, you have to collect the dots first.” But you can’t wait to keep collecting the dots. How to move forward even if you don’t have all the pieces of your puzzle would be key.

  
  

These ideas reinforced what I’ve been seeing: what was optimal yesterday isn’t optimal now and won’t be optimal tomorrow. Speed, agility, and the ability to optimize continuously are no longer nice-to-haves. And yes, data will always be incomplete. But decisions are still being made. The question is: how do we make those decisions faster and better, using what we already have?

3. AI: Hype vs. Value

GenAI was another hot topic, and for good reasons, but not every problem is a nail, and it’s not always the hammer you need. Agentic AI is also promising, though still early-stage.

It’s exciting to watch these technologies evolve, but there’s a reminder here: supply chains still haven’t fully adopted traditional AI tools like mathematical optimization and machine learning. In planning and complex decision-making, real value from Agentic AI will come after traditional AI is more widely and deeply embraced. One builds on the other.

Final Thought

The biggest confirmation for me from this conference was this:

If you want to build cost-efficient, resilient, and agile supply chains, you need to be ready to continuously reconfigure and optimize, and AI is what makes that possible.

I believe supply chain design, powered by AI (traditional, generative, and agentic), is on its way to becoming a core planning process, and we’re excited to be building for that future with Foresta®, our supply chain design and optimization platform.