Peter Bolstorff

At the Gartner Supply Chain Planning Summit in December 2025, Scott Luton sat down with Stephen Musciano, a former practitioner turned technology leader who now helps transform supply chain organizations through Lyric—a fast-growing, math-first, AI-native platform redefining what supply chain technology can be. Musciano, who began his supply chain career at companies such as New Balance and Under Armour, brings both real-world execution experience and deep technical vision to his work. That mix is central to what makes Lyric—and its philosophy—stand apart.   Lyric: A Platform, Not a Point Solution Musciano described Lyric as fundamentally different from traditional vendors. Rather than offering a single application or fixed module suite, Lyric provides a true supply chain platform in Lyric Studio—one built from composable, no-code building blocks that allow companies to create exactly what they need. “Think Legos,” Musciano explained. “We’re not selling you a car or a house. We give you the blocks so you can build what your supply chain truly needs. We might even give you a starter kit but the configuration and molding it to fit your business and your problem is where the magic happens.” Lyric Studio is intentionally designed centered on non-technical practitioners—people like “Maria,” Lyric’s…

Prospects of supply chain automation have the industry abuzz. It’s even become a major sticking point in the International Longshoremen’s Association contract negotiations with the United States Maritime Alliance. The dockworkers do not want ports to automate processes out of fear they will lose their jobs to machines. Today, there are seemingly endless possibilities for optimization. Terms like generative artificial intelligence and machine learning have become commonplace in discussions about ways to gain efficiencies and reduce costs. Can man and machine work together as businesses leverage automation for optimization? Beyond the Buzz: Understanding the Automation Imperative Machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), is described by Business News Daily as a later-stage development in which machines take in data on their own and then analyze it. Automation, on the other hand, is fixed on repetitive tasks; after a job is performed, an automation system “thinks no further.” The Business News Daily article explained that “automation involves an entire category of technologies that provide activity or work without human involvement,” while AI involves “a machine exhibiting and practicing something similar to what we describe as human thinking – that is, the ability to interact in thousands of ways with the…