Recent event takeaways from Managing Director, Camille Manso.
Over the past few weeks, I had the chance to be in two rooms that, on the surface, couldn’t have been more different. One was Kearney’s Future of Supply Chain Summit in Austin, a gathering of global supply chain executives wrestling with AI, talent, and resilience at scale. The other was NACDS’s Market Immersion in Dallas, a series of conversations, store visits, and panels with sales, merchandising and pharmacy leaders at retailers and brands focused on the realities of retail: what’s on the shelf, what’s not, and why it matters.
Together, they offered a rare, 360° view of where supply chain and retail are headed, and how close they actually are to becoming one conversation.
From Austin: The Operations Era
At the Future of Supply Chain Summit, the phrase that stuck with me was “the operations era.” The idea is simple but powerful: operations isn’t a support function anymore; it’s the strategy. Leaders talked about how the best supply chains today are growth engines, not cost centers – how they’re experimenting with new business models, monetizing data, and rethinking the link between operations and value creation.
But what fascinated me most wasn’t the technology automating operations, but instead how it was empowering the people who run operations to collaborate more effectively with colleagues and customers. This, I’m convinced, is the gold at the end of the rainbow in an agentic AI-powered world.
And yet, the most advanced companies are still overlooking the role of people as more AI agents come online, too afraid we won’t have a role. Organizations are stuck on who owns the AI agenda. Of the group of representing over a couple dozen organizations, the AI agenda was split with it being owned across different function leaders and no clear owners of the AI Agenda, with only a few organizations saying that it was owned by a cross-functional task force. We also surveyed the group around their organizations’ ranking on the AI maturity scale, and were surprised to find that no one dared to rate themselves as “AI-first” on the AI maturity scale, not even the Big Tech company that sells AI products to a substantial number of F500s. And the reason? It kept coming back to people buying in, changing their minds and habits.
It was refreshing to learn that we are all on this journey together, and things are changing so rapidly that we’d be foolish to say we have arrived at our destination.
From Dallas: Rewriting the In-Store Playbook
Speaking of destinations, this last week I found myself a hop, skip and massive jump away in Dallas for NACDS’ Market Immersion where I moderated a discussion around “Rewriting the In-Store Playbook: Customer-Centric Growth through AI, Robotics, and Data.”
We brought together three fascinating companies using cutting edge technology – from robots to Voice AI to decision intelligence – to make the store and pharmacy more intelligent, the customer journey more seamless, and partnerships between retailers and brands more profitable.
- Brain Corp and Driveline, together bringing ShelfOptix to the market for customers to use robots to scan shelves and surface the truth of what’s actually in stock.
- Hippocratic AI, applying safe, conversational AI to make the pharmacy experience more human-centric, reduce pharmacy workload, and connect clinical and commercial experiences.
- Growth Signals, helping brands and retailers spot early demand shifts by combining valuable internal data with external data, and act on them for new product development and innovation.
My discussions with the leaders in the room afterwards were illuminating. Beyond being excited by the business insights the technology itself was delivering today, they were focused on what happens after insights surface. Someone still has to move the product, update the tag, or reset the display. And that’s where the system often breaks down.
Several retail and CPG leaders told me the same story: even with the best analytics, items still go missing, sometimes sitting in the backroom or misplaced in the wrong aisle. The customer’s experience doesn’t care whether the product is out of stock or just out of place.
On the product development side, leaders might have access to troves of data that lead to insights about customers’ wants around a creatine gummy that delivers the brain benefits with an appropriate dosing and minimal sugars. Yet, execution still takes over a year because teams are uncoordinated.
This comes back to why we need people in the loop, and why we turn back to operations. Technology alone can’t solve the tension – between brands and retailers, and between data, insight and action – that came up again and again as a blocker to a better retail experience.
The Company of One
Later at dinner, we continued discussions around the future of the retail industry. The consensus around the room was striking: if we were to start a new company tomorrow, it would be small, agile, and built from day one to be AI-native. A company of one mindset is taking hold: fewer layers, faster learning, more clarity of purpose.
This was deja vu from Sean Ammirati’s session during the Future of Supply Chain Summit around the company startup. While large companies stand a chance to win in an AI-first world with their expansive customer base, vast amounts of data, and tribal knowledge, it’ll come down to their ability to operate more like a startup with fewer silos, more experimentation, and an obsession with a problem they intend to solve.
It made me think: in large organizations, how do we create that same agility without tearing down what already works?
Seeing It Up Close
Between sessions, NACDS arranged site visits to high-tech big-box stores, hyper local concept supermarkets, and a packaging innovation center. Walking those aisles and seeing early-stage robotics and predictive merchandising in action made the conversation tangible.
It’s one thing to talk about “AI in retail” from a conference stage. It’s another to watch a small team pick and pack online orders which generate 20% of revenues for one store, experience touchless checkout using computer vision and cameras, or see packaging that was designed not just to catch attention, but to improve sustainability, replenishment, and logistics flow. Again, the conversations kept coming back to the importance of collaborating with supply chain teams, who can influence what the optimal packaging would be for the business’ pallet size, trailer size, and transit conditions.
These visits reminded me that innovation isn’t just about algorithms or models. It’s about the physical interfaces where brands and customers actually meet: the shelf, the package, the conversation at the counter.
The Common Thread: Closing the Reality Gap
Across both events, the same theme kept surfacing: the reality gap. At the Summit, it was about translating AI ambition into everyday decisions. At NACDS, it was about aligning data with what’s truly happening in stores. Both are versions of the same challenge: closing the distance between what we think is true and what actually is.
I left convinced that progress in this space won’t come from more dashboards or digital twins, but from better accountability loops. The winners will be those who make data not just visible, but actionable, where someone owns what happens next.
Where We Go from Here
The future of retail and supply chain isn’t about who has the most advanced tech. It’s about who can connect the dots fastest… between insight and execution, between partners, and between people. We talk a lot about “visibility,” but what we really need is veracity. We need confidence that what we see reflects reality.
That takes collaboration, not just software. Shared data, shared incentives, and shared responsibility for outcomes. It also takes culture, one that gives teams permission to experiment, learn quickly, and fix what’s broken without waiting for a steering committee.
Standing in those two rooms – one filled with global supply chain leaders, the other with retail and merchandising executives – I realized they’re solving the same puzzle from opposite ends. One is redesigning the flow of information; the other, the flow of goods.
The future will belong to the ones who see they’re part of the same system.
