Dhairya Patel

At Gartner Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo 2026 in Orlando, some of the sharpest minds in supply chain gathered to tackle one central question: what does the next operating model for supply chain actually look like? In a special livestream conversation, Scott Luton sat down with Mike Griswold, VP Analyst at Gartner, alongside fellow Supply Chain Now hosts Karin Bursa and Jake Barr, to unpack the biggest themes emerging from this year’s symposium. The consensus? Supply chain leaders are moving beyond AI fascination and toward something much bigger: redesigning how decisions, workflows, and organizations operate.   AI Is No Longer the Story. Outcomes Are One of the strongest themes from the event was a more mature, pragmatic approach to AI adoption. According to Mike Griswold, many organizations are finally moving past the “shock and awe” phase that dominated conversations a year ago. “People need to figure out exactly what problem or problems AI is going to solve for them,” Griswold explains. That may sound simple, but it represents a significant shift. Instead of experimenting with AI for AI’s sake, companies are becoming more disciplined about identifying operational value and measurable business outcomes. Griswold also warns against a familiar trap: creating “highly efficient…

Special Guest Blog Post written by Mark Holmes with InterSystems   Top 10 Ways a Data Gateway Improves Time to Value Across End-to-End Supply Chains Supply chain practitioners seeking the best way to speed decision intelligence, unify supply chain data, increase operational efficiency, and improve supply chain resilience can benefit from a supply chain data gateway. A data gateway provides unified access to supply chain data from various sources, including enterprise systems, supply chain applications, data feeds, data warehouses, data lakes, data marts, and business entities. Here are the top 10 ways a supply chain data gateway can improve your supply chain performance. Enables You to Identify Inefficiencies and Make Better and Informed Decisions A unified view of your data accelerates informed decision making and provides you with a comprehensive understanding of your supply chain. For example, a supply planner gains accelerated access to customer orders, inventory levels, and transportation schedules, all in one place, to identify inefficiencies and make better informed decisions. Reduces Implementation Times Enterprises and supply chain software providers strive to reduce application implementation times. A data gateway can serve as a front-end for a range of supply chain software applications, speeding and simplifying data ingestion, integration,…