Christine Barnhart

To compete in today’s supply chain landscape, you need the best talent. We can’t overstate this enough. The talent competition is fierce and has increased due to the rapid onset of machine learning and artificial intelligence. If you don’t have a talent management partner who can accelerate your leadership placements, you run the risk of missing out on the best candidates and making a bad hire. It’s better to trust professionals who can commit a full-time approach to helping you find the supply chain leaders you need, rather than disrupt your own operations, hoping you have the right access and relationships to land the best talent. Here are 5 leading supply chain recruiting and executive search organizations: SCM Talent Group The key differentiator for SCM Talent Group and other supply chain recruiters is their decades of relationships, coupled with thought leadership. Founder and Managing Partner Rodney Apple helped to build out Home Depot and Coca-Cola’s supply chains more than 20 years ago. These decades of experience allow SCM Talent Group to better identify leaders who can help to transform supply chains into competitive advantages. Apple’s deep relationships in this niche industry have allowed his team to access hard-to-find talent pools…

Execution Is Everything At Manifest 2026, Scott Luton spoke with Aadil Kazmi, Head of AI at Infios, to discuss the next chapter of intelligent supply chain execution. Infios provides an integrated suite of supply chain execution software: order management, warehouse management, and transportation management – all running on a single data model. “When a supply chain runs on a single data model, you can make better decisions,” Kazmi explained. Fragmented systems require expensive data lakes and normalization efforts before even basic BI is possible. An integrated ecosystem simplifies intelligence from the start. For Kazmi, AI is not about flashy demos. But rather, it is about execution. The most advanced technologies mean little if companies cannot execute faster, smarter, and more resiliently in the real world.   Disruption Isn’t Going Away Reflecting on 2025, Kazmi did not sugarcoat reality. Ports closed. Trade wars escalated. Wildfires disrupted domestic production. Shipping lanes tightened. “We don’t believe that supply chain disruptions are going away anytime soon,” he said. Volatility is becoming the baseline, not the exception. But what is changing in 2026 is mindset. Kazmi describes what he calls the “Amazon effect for AI.” Just as Amazon forced retailers to rethink last-mile execution a…