Now swap in the word “innovation” for “politics,” and you are fairly describing the plight of business today.
And, by association, global supply chains. Those that fail to innovate are in danger of being “innovated” out of existence. Artificial intelligence alone is mandating radical change throughout organizations: the way they design, make, and move product and, most notably, the role of humans in doing it.
More on that in a moment. First, let us mark another year of the Supply Chain Innovation Award, launched more than two decades ago by SupplyChainBrain and the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals to honor stellar examples of creativity across industries, disciplines and business processes. Over that time, our judges have reviewed hundreds of submissions and honored a broad range of companies crafting solutions to supply chain challenges both old and new. This year’s winner is GOFO, a specialist in last-mile delivery whose intelligence platform called ATLAS created a single digital infrastructure combining order and transportation management, and which came to the rescue of 3PL ShipMonk when its core carrier ceased operations overnight.
Additional finalists, all of whose submissions are included in this annual issue of SupplyChainBrain devoted to the award, include:
Georgia-Pacific, which gained control of its drivers and yard operations in a sweeping initiative with the support of project44;
Intel, which transformed its chemical and gas supply management through construction of an intelligent control tower;
Intel (again!), whose agentic AI-driven Market Intelligence platform created a means of enabling proactive supply chain defense, and
Reliance Industries Limited, which shifted from “reactive” to “resilient” with the help of an emergency response network for safe hazardous materials transportation.
We congratulate the winner and all of the finalists of this year’s competition.
But wait, as the old infomercials used to say, there’s more. Also in this issue, we present a special section on AI in supply chain. We examine the still-young technology, which is progressing in leaps and bounds beyond what anyone could have foretold, from multiple angles, including physical infrastructure, memory supply, cybersecurity, impact on IT budgets, and critical medical logistics. Like it or not, no element of supply chain management — or, for that matter, our everyday lives — is going to remain untouched by AI. With the rapid proliferation of massive data centers and raging debates about the fate of human talent, the technology sits squarely at the center of our national conversation. You might say it has normalized the very idea of innovation, and is forcing us all to embrace it.
So hats off to the organizations that are proactively riding the trend, and we hope to learn more about them in the form of future entries to the Supply Chain Innovation Award. (Watch for the opening of the submissions period for 2027 early in the new year.) Because in the years ahead, every supply chain leader will be faced with the question: Will you innovate? Or will you be innovated?
