In March, we returned to the Exiger Executive Forum, where industry leaders gathered to discuss the readiness of businesses to tackle volatility across the supply chain, and where focus should lie.
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The latest Exiger Executive Forum, entitled When geopolitics hits the P&L: Redesigning supply chains for structural conflict, was one which aimed to reflect the current supply chain climate – and the concerns of the industry leaders therein.
The event took place on the evening of the 4th of March, and was once again hosted at the beautiful Great Scotland Yard Hotel in London. Back in November, the Exiger Executive Forum dug deep into the illusion of control across modern supply chains. This time, the focus lay in reframing geopolitics as a variable rather than a risk.
The idea was for this discussion between industry leaders to remove fear and turn geopolitics into a business consideration rather than an inherent risk. The theme set the tone for a strategic discussion about margin pressures, liquidity exposure, and – ultimately – supply chain redesign. Encouraging open dialogue like this ensures greater confidence as procurement and supply chain professionals navigate an often-volatile landscape.
Ian Cronin, Manager, Head of Advanced Manufacturing and Supply Chains at the World Economic Forum, moderated the evening’s panel conversation. He opened the event by talking about the fact that when companies are navigating the current supply chain environment with regard to geopolitical instability, they can’t think of it in terms of an external variable that they’re tracking on a dashboard.
“It’s really become a structural force,” he stated. “I’s changing our global value chains; it’s changing the underlying business models and how these operate. Simultaneously, we’re seeing governments changing how they operate. Utilising tools like tariffs has been the name of the game, as well as looking at sanctions and resource nationalisation and their long-term impact on business.”
Cronin then introduced the evening’s expert panel, which consisted of:
Tobias Ellwood, former UK Minister and Chair of the Defence Select Committee
Sir Michael Fallon, former UK Secretary of State for Defence
Koray Köse, CEO & Chief Analyst at Köse Advisory, Senior Fellow at GlobSEC GeoTech Centre, and Board Member of the Slave-Free Alliance
Tim Fowler, Client Executive at Exiger
From headlines to P&L
Cronin brought the conversation to the panel by asking Ellwood whether he believes that structural conflict is now the baseline in business and something to adapt to. “I’m deliberately going to be provocative because I think that teases out some thoughts of where things may go in what is a very, very confusing atmosphere,” Ellwood replied. “We are seeing, living, and breathing this with what’s happening in Iran right now. And the short answer to your question is: absolutely. You need to build-in the sense that we’re in permanent change. What is your resilience? Where is your ability to move fast and think fast? And that isn’t a natural place to be after three decades of relative peace. It’s a different mindset that we need to get every level of the C-suite of businesses to actually think about.”
Following this, Fallon was asked for his thoughts and perceptions on whether the geopolitical friction we’re seeing is likely to intensity – and where it might be easing. “I think Iran is just the start of our troubles,” he stated. “I think we will look back on the 1990s and 2000s, perhaps up to the financial crisis, as a golden age where governments sorted stuff out between them as part of the rules-based international order. Over the last 15 years or so, we’ve seen those rules slowly dissolve. We’ve seen the vaccine crisis. And we’re seeing the UN more impotent than ever. So I’m pretty pessimistic about this.”
Next, Cronin asked Köse to weigh in on the P&L aspect from a strategic perspective. He queried at what point Köse sees geopolitical risk becoming a stronger pressure on the P&L of companies he works with and advises. “Generally speaking, I think the P&L impact is when the geopolitical change is structural, and not just a one-off headline,” said Köse.
“When we’re thinking of cycles where geopolitical structural changes are happening, the time between them is shorter. I have this theory of three Vs when it comes to that: velocity, volatility, and visibility. We’re generally not prepared across the board, so go into a reactive mode rather than a preventive mode because we are so preoccupied with efficiency. We’re so stuck in certain silos that we do not comprehend the interdependency of a global network. Because of that, we kind of fly blind when it comes to comprehensive integration of risk management into your operations, or geopolitics as a cornerstone of your strategy rather than a headline that you need to react to. So when you put those three Vs together, it pretty much explains the mess we are in.”
For Fowler, having deep visibility of multiple risk dimensions is a foundational requirement at this point. However, it’s not enough. “They need to now have visibility into their second and third tiers of suppliers, so that they can get early warnings. They need to see what’s coming up from below in their supply chain. If you think about Chief Supply Chain Officers and Chief Procurement Officers now, they’re being asked the ‘what if’ questions by their boards. But I think we just bring it down to the humble Category Manager. A lot of my work is trying to help CPOs and Chief Supply Chain Officers, but ultimately you’re serving that Category Manager. You’re trying to help them see the wood for the trees and make the right decisions.”
Supplier liquidity, financial exposure, and payment fragility
Cronin: “Where are organisations underestimating payment rail exposure and currency risk?”
Köse: “There are a couple of aspects to it. The major transformation will be from global networks to lock away our sovereign but federated systems that you need to build up in supply chains, that can actually co-survive almost at the same point in time. So I wouldn’t call it redundancy because they are literally making the same products, but for different markets and different purposes and different clients. And when it comes down to it, the glue is really the financial environment that impacts that collaboration.”
Cronin: “From a defence and national security standpoint, how critical are financial chokepoints as strategic leverage?”
Fallon: “I think companies will have to be increasingly aware, if they’re going into new markets or markets that are becoming relatively less stable, of how what they’re doing fits in with the national security strategy of the country in which they’re operating. They need to take more account of it, particularly when it comes down to the likely investments by the government themselves and the offtakes that they’re likely to be offering.”
Cronin: “What tools or intelligence capabilities help organisations identify supplier fragility before it becomes operational disruption or insolvency?”
Fowler: “I think most of my clients think about it in terms of the people, the process, and the technology. On the people side, jobs in supply chain are changing. The process piece is interesting: think about your organisation’s appetite for risk and how that changes regionally. And with technology, you have to go beyond your immediate suppliers and start understanding tier twos and threes. That gets very big, very quickly. You need to get the foundational aspects in place, then move at speed because these are the business-affecting challenges that we’re seeing.”
Cronin: “How should companies think about operating in regions where financial restrictions can shift overnight?”
Ellwood: “The two areas which I think are concerning for all businesses are, firstly, grey zone warfare. What happened to Marks & Spencer and Land Rover is going to become a regular occurrence. How do you actually prepare for those scenarios? This is Russia already bringing war to Britain. If they could claim any form of victory in Ukraine, that’s going to get worse. The second is that the race for quantum is going to happen in the next 4-5 years.”
Structural dependency and choke points
It’s clear that constant change is not only something to be expected, but to be prepared for. Businesses can’t live in fear of what comes next – they must be vigilant and respond proactively, not reactively, to the supply chain landscape. When lack of predictability seems to be the one thing supply chain leaders can predict, how can leaders be expected to maintain strategic clarity amidst a chaotic operating environment? This is the question Cronin posed to the panel.
Ellwood’s answer starts at the very top. “You need a better quality of leadership to deal with this change. The world is getting more dangerous, and we don’t have faith in the leadership we have on display in parliament right now. We need a revamp of our own democracy, because we’re getting to the point where we don’t even want to be like ourselves. And that’s worrying when authoritarianism is on the rise.”
Ellwood clarified that he was also referring to supply chain leadership, and Fallon agreed. “Are we moving into a much riskier and dangerous world? Yes,” he said. “What can we do about it? In business, you’re going to have to live with geopolitics. What do we want our leaders to do? We’ve got to somehow roll up our sleeves and rebuild some of the international order that used to serve us so well. That means working with democracies that share our values. That’s going to be hard, and it’s going to require a much higher quality of political leadership – but that is something business leadership can join in with.”
Köse confirmed that values are, indeed, important, and brought the conversation back to P&L. “What we need relearn is that the world is not always forgiving, and maybe it’s less forgiving than ever. In that context, when we think about how often we have the conversation in business about how ‘we didn’t know better at the time’, that’s just an excuse. It’s not really something you can claim anymore. Plausible deniability doesn’t save your company or your job, especially in the context of AI, where you have the solutions at hand to inform and automate.
“You need to put yourself in a position of control, and that’s a big factor when it comes to P&L. You need to control your P&L, and how do you do that? Not by taking the past into today’s decisions, but by considering future competition and where things are going.”
To round up the conversation, Cronin asked the panel what businesses need to consider to ensure their resilience at times of structural unrest, and where that unrest lies day-to-day. “Think about what you could do in 72 hours if you had a complete power blackout,” Ellwood said. “How would your business function? It’s something to ask yourself and your team.”
“That’s some sensible advice,” added Fallon, “but you also need to look at your own security strategy. We’ve talked a lot about governments and developing national security strategies, but what about your security strategy as a company? What are the key dependencies?”
“Think about risk as a change and an opportunity,” Köse added. “Don’t just look at it in shock and awe and freeze. Disruption is an opportunity, no matter how scary it seems.”
The conversation shifted to summarising comments, with Cronin impressing upon the room the importance of having these discussions. “We underestimate the power of dialogue and open conversation,” he stated. This is why the Exiger Executive Forum is so vital – it brings together experts and those keen to expand their horizons, and creates a space for exactly this kind of open dialogue. Thank you to Exiger, once again, for inviting us along to absorb these valuable insights. We look forward to the next one.
As Manifest 2026 draws to a close, Senior Vice President of Industry Relations and Strategic Initiatives, Manifest, Katie Date reflects…
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As Manifest 2026 draws to a close, Senior Vice President of Industry Relations and Strategic Initiatives, Manifest, Katie Date reflects on record-breaking engagement, the accelerating impact of AI, and how the fast-growing event continues to unite the global supply chain community. Plus, an exciting announcement that will see Manifest’s influence spread even wider…
As the exhibition halls begin to quiet and the final meetings wrap up, the sense of momentum surrounding Manifest 2026 remains unmistakable. The event has once again positioned itself as a focal point for the global logistics and supply chain community, bringing together shippers, carriers, technology providers, investors and startups under one roof for several days of intensive networking and knowledge exchange.
For Katie Date, Senior Vice President of Industry Relations and Strategic Initiatives, the energy is the clearest measure of success. “It feels great,” she says as the event draws to a close. “This year has been so successful on so many different fronts. The energy in Manifest has truly been palpable. You just walk around and you can feel the buzz.”
That buzz is measurable as well as visible. Manifest’s proprietary badge technology tracks interactions across the venue, revealing the scale of engagement. “As of this morning,” Date explains, “our click to connect Qlik technology had recorded over 75,000 connections. By the end of today, I’m sure we’ll have surpassed 100,000 connections. We had almost 7,500 people check in to be a part of Manifest, which is just huge growth.”
For the organisers, those interactions are the event’s defining metric. “Really how we measure success here at Manifest is on those connections,” she says. “To see so many people making valuable connections really is a great measure of success.”
A platform for the entire ecosystem
From its earliest iteration, Manifest has been designed to serve the full supply chain ecosystem rather than any single segment. That founding principle continues to guide the event’s expansion. “I think we’ve done a very good job of staying close to the original vision, which was to serve the entire supply chain ecosystem,” says Date. “We’re not an event that’s just focusing on shippers or carriers or third-party logistics providers. We’re bringing them all together. We’re bringing in investors and startups. We’re creating almost three days of content and exhibition that really give them an opportunity to interact and create value.”
In the latest CPOstrategy Podcast, experienced supply chain executive Venkatesh Srinivasan discusses the current state of play in the supply chain in the midst of seismic evolution and transformation.
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“Challenges are opportunities in disguise.”
Venkatesh Srinivasan is clear that the hand you are dealt with is what you make of it.
And in the supply chain, on the back of a myriad of recent challenges the industry has been forced to deal with, many would agree that was sound advice.
Navigating supply chain challenges
Indeed, the likes of COVID-19, geopolitical issues and trade wars as well as inflation concerns are just some of the many hurdles the supply chain industry has had to mitigate. That isn’t to mention the rise of AI and sustainability as increasingly prominent items on the leadership agenda.
Witnessing these disruptions first-hand is Srinivasan who, as a supply chain and operations executive with 20 years of experience in growth-oriented technology companies, is used to dealing with change. He possesses a diverse experience that covers automotive, consumer hardware, semiconductors, and climate tech. Over the years, Srinivasan has demonstrated success in building supplier partnerships and driving profitability and has rich experience in quality, sourcing, and working with suppliers in Asia and Europe for startups and large corporations.
Srinivasan is keen to stress that what the supply chain is facing is a byproduct of the complexity of the global environment. “It’s a reflection of the world we live in,” Srinivasan tells us in our recent podcast. “It’s a function of our times and there is no denying that the past 20 to 25 years have been exceptionally turbulent. This decade alone has brought tariff pressures, preceded by COVID-19, which disrupted not only supply chains but also markets and demand. Now, with the rise of AI, we’re seeing renewed constraints on critical electronic components – echoing the shortages experienced during the pandemic.”
Reflecting further, Srinivasan sees similarities with the financial crash of 2008 which triggered a recession and forced many businesses to close. “Although the recession began in 2007, its second-order effects lingered well into 2014,” he tells us. “Even before that, we saw the dot-com crash and earlier economic shocks. There is no getting away from the fact the past 20 years have certainly seemed more unpredictable.
“It’s easy to get consumed by geopolitics, macroeconomics, and monetary policy. But from a practitioner’s perspective, the priority is staying anchored to the company’s core mission. That means serving customers first, building products they value, and designing a supply chain that delivers those products at the right cost, quality, and speed. On top of that, you have to be prepared for it. That means figuring out what the edge cases are in your supply chain, anticipating disruptions, and having a plan of action well in advance. If you do a combination of those things, you will be in a very good position.”
One of the best ways to meet challenges head-on is to learn lessons from the past. If COVID-19 and tariffs proved anything it was the importance of diversifying supply chains and introducing greater regionalisation and nearshoring to be closer to end customers and reduce complexity.
“Companies that respond well to disruption often find new doors opening as a result,” Srinivasan explains. “That said, the past 18 months we have gone through the tariff challenges which are set to persist. Companies have got to get used to having a localised supply chain in their region of operations. For example, if you serve customers across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, your supply chain should be as close as possible to those end consumers. It is also very important to invest in new capacity within those geographies. It’s not always easy, but finding suppliers and sometimes even insourcing is essential to helping deal with external shocks.”
Digital journey
With training in industrial engineering, Srinivasan was well placed to step into a career within the supply chain. Srinivasan believes there were several key aspects that appealed to him and encouraged him to forge a career within the industry. “Working in the supply chain is naturally a very outward looking role and is connected to the real economy,” he explains. “On the inside of the company, you get to collaborate with a large number of teams, whether it is design engineering, factory operations, sales and planning, legal. It’s a good mix of technical commercial aspects of the business, and the supply chain is also quite central to advancing the goals of the company. A combination of all of that was very exciting and of course, there is certainly never a dull moment in this function.”
And if the external geopolitical noise was not enough, there has also been disruption of another kind in recent years in the acceleration of digital tools such as AI and data analytics. Regardless of the industry, AI is having a major influence on the way operations are conducted. Today, Srinivasan is also a trusted advisor who builds consensus and drives decision-making with executives and board members. As part of that role, Srinivasan has had a front row seat to transformation within the supply chain due to his work with Truco and Autumn Labs.
“At its core, AI automates workflows and streamlines supply chain and purchasing operations – and that momentum is building fast,” he says. “Many companies now train models on an organisation’s own data and interpret it in real-time, surfacing actionable insights through dashboards that help teams prioritise and execute their day more effectively. I recently spoke with the founder of Truco, who are excelling in this space, about how they are using AI to seamlessly automate workflows.
“Beyond that, where AI meets manufacturing, the impact is truly game-changing. Another example I have is that a startup I advise called Autumn Labs offers a real-world example. Their platform connects directly to factory machines, processing live production data to detect latent issues before they become costly problems. The result is optimised operations across yield, throughput, production costs, and statistical process control. They’ve already connected more than 100 stations and analysed data from over a million units – that is mind boggling to think about. The bottom line is that we are well and truly in the AI era, and it is going to have a long-term impact.”
Managing supply chain talent
And such is AI’s continued influence in supply chain and procurement that Srinivasan believes that the technology isn’t just a ‘nice to have’ any longer. Its recent explosion has meant the necessity of embracing AI solutions and leveraging new technologies such as agentic AI into operations to drive better decision-making and efficiency is a non-negotiable.
“I look at AI as an enormous productivity tool, which allows us to make better decisions and make them faster,” he says. “In absence of embracing AI, it is going to translate into those particular companies not having cost, speed and quality advantages that their competitors using AI would have. I think it’s quite simple as thinking back to the adoption of PCs back in the early nineties and Excel sheets. It was clearly inevitable that you have to choose those technologies and the same is true now otherwise you risk obsoleting yourself. Honestly, I don’t think there’s much of a choice here.”
With AI firmly in the back of minds, tomorrow’s supply chain leaders need to think differently. As a result, the workforce of the future must develop a skill set that not only thrives and overcomes today’s challenges but also equip themselves with an agile approach that enables them to tackle those hurdles set to come down the track.
“Firstly, you have to be curious about the work you’re doing and the world in which you live,” stresses Srinivasan. “You have to leverage data because it is going to be omnipresent, but it’s also about ensuring that you make sense of that data. It’s exceptionally important to build relationships even more so today than ever before. You need strong human relationships and a good network, and have to be used to travelling, being on site with suppliers and seeing where the real work is happening. You have to visit customers, get their insights and learn from them in real-time. A combination of using data to gain insights and building human relationships is going to be even more important than it already is.”
Bright future
Naturally, due to the exponential transformation within the supply chain, there are fears from some quarters that AI will replace human jobs as companies seek greater efficiency and cost savings. However, Srinivasan believes that it is a reframing of the role rather than replacement as graduates entering the workforce will possess a skill set better suited to succeed in the modern workplace.
“A new person coming out of college and joining the workforce previously would have been at a disadvantage if they did not have computer programming skills,” he says. “But going forward, you really don’t need those skills anymore. Many of your tasks can be automated and AI has taken up basic level coding already. Of course, you need to be technically literate, but you don’t need to be an expert. What that does is it opens up the dimension where you can go deeper into the things that you are good at.
“For example, a chemical engineer doesn’t necessarily need to know much about coding, so let them be exceptional at the chemical engineering part. You can do well by just being comfortable in your pure sciences background or whatever background you come from. People are going to be more empowered to lean in more into the domains where they excel at.”
Moving forward, the supply chain is in the midst of its most transformative era ever. With an unprecedented level of technology at the industry’s disposal that can supercharge operations, Srinivasan is positive about what the next few years of the industry might hold. “There’s never a dull moment, and I’ve said this to myself over and over for the past 10 years now,” he reveals. “I think the world’s changing faster than capacities are getting formed. But opportunities come out of challenges and you have to make the best of it. It is certainly exciting – there’s no doubt about it.”
The AI leader joins Hy-Tek to scale its IntraOne software platform
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Hy-Tek Intralogistics, a leading provider of warehouse and distribution technology, is excited to announce today the appointment of Jim Peters as Senior Director, Software Development. In this leadership role, Peters will oversee the engineering and product development strategy, focusing on scaling high-performance teams and advancing the architecture of the company’s software solutions.
Peters joins Hy-Tek with over 18 years of experience in senior leadership roles, bringing deep expertise in systems architecture, cloud computing, and machine learning. He has a proven track record of building and scaling engineering organisations, having successfully managed global teams across on-site and offshore locations in the US, Europe, Australia, and Hong Kong.
Most recently, Peters served as Senior Software Engineering Manager at Vanderlande, where he led engineering and product teams in North America and Europe to develop next-generation Warehouse Execution Systems (WES). During his tenure, he was instrumental in updating legacy systems to modern development practices and piloting an Agentic AI development program to assist with system review and refactoring.
Robert Kluck, Vice President of Software Development at Hy-Tek Intralogistics, said: “Jim’s extensive background in WES development and his forward-thinking approach to AI and machine learning make him an invaluable asset to our technology leadership team. His ability to transform organisations using Agile methodologies aligns perfectly with our mission to deliver cutting-edge software solutions to our customers.”
At Hy-Tek, Peters will leverage his proficiency in transforming organisations and his experience with AI platforms to enhance decision support and development velocity. His leadership will be pivotal in driving the continuous evolution of Hy-Tek’s software offerings, ensuring they remain at the forefront of the supply chain industry.
Caroline Grey, Co-Founder and CRO, Treefera, explores how better visibility is fixing blind spots
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The world is getting noisier. Climate volatility, environmental degradation and political instability are increasing both the number and the severity of disturbances that ripple through supply chains. With each disturbance, new complexities arise from new variables, like soil health and rainfall shifts, regulatory changes and geopolitical friction. These variables compound into an opaque risk ecosystem.
The unfortunate reality is that traditional data collection methods, aimed at managing supply chains and reducing risks across the all-important first mile, now can’t keep up in this challenging environment. Manual data collection or static surveys can’t process this rising tide of complexity fast enough to inform decisions, meaning businesses don’t have access to critical information. The result? Without this primary data, businesses are “flying blind,” which means they don’t have control over their supply chain operational performance, thus impacting revenue.
Technology plays a crucial role in quietening the noise, restoring clarity and providing leaders with the insights needed to improve supply chain resilience. We’re already seeing that satellite imagery, drone information and ground truth data can all be elevated using AI agents, allowing businesses to make better decisions.
The first-mile challenge
Today, 60% of business costs and risks occur within the first mile of logistical supply chains, meaning poor management of risk in these sourcing regions can directly impact business success. At the same time, regulatory pressure and requirements are growing, with the impending EUDR and EU omnibus legislation. Businesses need to have access to the right processes and technology solutions to ensure compliance.
For the EUDR, this means that any business that operates within, or sells to, Europe will need to ensure no deforestation occurs within their supply chain. They will also need to backdate evidence from as far back 2020. While timelines for this regulation remain uncertain, acting now to prepare for compliance should be a business priority today.
Given the scale of first-mile risk, visibility is essential to build resilience. This can only be done by leaning into the right mix of technologies, including the smart use of AI to generate insights that allow for greater, better-informed decision-making. AI allows us to abstract complexity – leveraging the massive acceleration in the capabilities of satellites over the past 10 years and turning disparate and disconnected data into actionable insights at global scale and near-instant speed.
AI-nativity needs to be the first step
While the entire supply chain can be opaque, the first mile has historically been hardest to manage, with information about sourcing regions and commodity origins often fragmented, remote and expensive.Businesses need access to insightful data that uncovers what’s really happening on the ground.
Data governs the flow of capital, and the quality of this data can equip enterprises with the ability to scope out and invest in appropriate sourcing options.Satellites, drones and ground truth data help with this, but only to a point – they provide surface level information without the depth of insight necessary for action.
AI-enabled data systems make it possible to track first-mile activity in real time. These tools translate raw, real-world data into scalable insights that decision makers can act on. They can also be tailored to specific business needs – from monitoring particular geographies to aligning with the compliance frameworks that matter most.
How does this work in practice? Take a large brand sourcing cocoa in Madagascar, for example, which needs to assess the risks posed by deforestation in order to meet EUDR standards. By utilising AI and satellite technology, they can map their entire supply chain to assess deforestation, tenure and labour risks, while producing automated DDS (Due Diligence Statement) reports ready to be submitted to the EU.
Agentic AI is the enabler here, synthesising complex and vast real-world datasets into expert-grade insights that are accessible at speed and scale. AI agents build on traditional AI models through autonomy and comprehensive self-learning mechanisms. Ultimately, this technology supports businesses in understanding the risk landscape within the first mile. And when incorporated into models that include regulatory and compliance frameworks, businesses can manage accountability and maintain their governance commitments.
Building deep insights from historic blind spots
The factors that affect global supply chains show no sign of slowing down – it’s time for businesses to take a different approach to risk identification and management, especially within the first mile. By ensuring access to accurate, scalable data and utilising real-time monitoring, businesses are laying the foundation for unwavering supply chain resilience.
For the C-Suite, the stakes are clear: revenue security and enterprise value now hinge on visibility at the first mile. In a world of climate shocks, political instability and regulatory pressure, legible supply chain data is no longer a technical nice-to-have; it is the foundation for protecting continuity, defending margins and sustaining growth over the long term.
SupplyChain Strategy attended July’s Exiger Executive Forum to hear from the best and the brightest in the industry.
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Supply chain resilience is one of the most pressing concerns of modern business, whether executives are aware of it or not. That was the central theme of the Exiger Executive Forum held on July 23rd 2025. Titled Supply Chain Sovereignty in a Fractured World: Winning the AI and Geopolitical Race for Resilience, the event brought together business analysts, CEOs, supply chain and procurement executives, academics, and politicians for an open discussion around supply chain sovereignty and the urgent need to secure supply chains across myriad industries and territories.
As geopolitical events, trade wars, and threats to globalised networks threaten to destabilise global and local supply chains, the case for supply chain sovereignty, which is an organisation’s ability to control its supply chain and minimise dependence on external suppliers, becomes increasingly stark. However, a myriad of stakeholders must come together to enable organisations and nations to gain independent control of supply chains, and collaboration between industry, government, and academia is essential.
Three guest speakers joined Maria Villablanca, CEO and Co-Founder of Future Insights Network, each representing voices from within politics, business, and academia: Tobias Ellwood, former UK Minister and Chair of the Defence Select Committee; Koray Köse, CEO and Chief Analyst of Köse Advisory, Senior Fellow at GlobSEC Geotech Centre, and Board Member of Slave-Free Alliance; and Karsten Machholz, Professor for Supply Chain Management and Strategic Procurement at University of Applied Sciences, Wuerzburg-Schweinfurt.
The discussion exemplified the discordancy of priorities and perspectives among senior voices from all angles regarding security, economics, policies all impacting value chains, albeit with a shared willingness to engage in secure, competitive, ethical and innovative supply chains, fuelling businesses and economies through heightened volatility in a fractured world that is recalibrating through the era of reglobalisation.
Supply chain sovereignty: Bridging political understanding, and urgency
“It is a dangerous world that we’re entering,” Ellwood warned. “If I ask you ‘Do you think the world will be safer or more dangerous in five years from now?’, I think we’d all agree in which direction it’s going. We have to then ask ourselves how we prepare for that.” To that end, Ellwood believes an increased focus on supply chain sovereignty is both an economic and military imperative.
For Ellwood, the central issue is limited understanding, both public and private, around the urgency presented by the current risk and threat environments. Through the combination of limited knowledge around supply chain complexity and an election cycle-focused impetus to enact vote-winning policies, he believes the political class lacks both the nous and urgency to prioritise supply chain sovereignty.
“After 20 years in politics, I can safely say that many politicians are simply unaware of what’s coming over the hill,” said Ellwood. “The tide took me out to the last general election, and so I went from helping to craft and nudge policy and encourage Britain to move forward to then scrutinising what we were doing, not just at home but internationally. Now that I’m outside of politics, I continue doing those same things.”
The necessity for political engagement is not lost on Köse, who through his own experiences of researching, advising and leading supply chain organisations, has been advocating for supply chain resilience as a top line driver for economies and companies, has equally encountered the depth of that disconnect.
“At an early point I realised that geopolitics is the key denominator for all value chains and all of us in this context,” he said, adding that work is overdue but starting to be underway to bridge this gap. “The London Defence Conference, as one critical congregation, is key for you all folks to be aware of. Not only because of what they do in terms of bringing the politicians into one room to debate some of the most fierce topics of the day, but it’s all about convergence. Bringing in supply chain leaders, policy makers and technology folks with a direct approach to debate.”
Villablanca noted that Ellwood’s presence was indicative of a gradually shifting tide, however. “It’s not lost on me that here we are in this panel, talking about supply chain, and we have a former politician with us,” she said. “That is very different to some of my earliest supply chain conferences where we didn’t see that, so it’s a sign of the times. Set the scene for us around why you’re here and why it’s important to discuss the geopolitical situation vis-a-vis supply chain today.”
“I spent most of my time in politics trying to strategise, trying to go four or five chess moves ahead, and I found I was on my own,” Ellwood replied. “Politicians operate for the day, for the here and now, the election cycle; the news cycle is what keeps them busy. They’re not thinking about these things and yet the world we’re now seeing in everything… everything is being weaponised because that is the change in the character of conflict.
“But today, from my perspective, I see the world splintering into two spheres of hugely competing influences. If you look at the number of countries that have signed up to China’s One Belt One Road initiative, you’ll see that many of them are either opting or hedging their bets as to where things go.
“To make matters worse, our exemplifiers of what democracy looks like aren’t in a good place. We see what’s going on in America, British politics and so on, and Europe and America are not on the same page. We aren’t promoting global law in the sense that we had a sense of determination that we had when organisations were set up in 1945. Other nations are getting together and realising that there’s an opportunity to exploit the wobbliness of our world order and do things their own way.
“That’s where the mechanisation of just about anything comes in to cause us economic harm, to sow political discord from afar. It’s very easy to do and becoming easier simply because of the openness of our society. It means, from a rudimentary perspective, anything you do can be weaponised against you.”
“It’s very easy, from afar, to then limit your supply chains and thereby limit your capabilities. There are countries that specialise in sowing economic discord from afar. They understand and learn and know supply chains better than we do, and they can work out which missing pieces will cause our assembly lines to grind to a halt.”
That lack of preparedness, he says, is an impediment to putting the nation on a footing that could support a war effort on the scale of the World Wars.
He continued: “There’s also the prospect of preparing for war, which means that we are suddenly spending more money on defence. Our ability to switch on the supply chain levers to support military capability is not there. This is why companies that have no connection with the defence world need to think about the services they provide that might have a military bearing. In five years time, you may be called upon to do exactly that.
“That is the mindset we now need to get into. Security and economy are one and the same now, and that’s what we need to learn.”
AI, foresight, and risk strategy
The conversation then shifted to the business side, where securing critical supply chains powering key technologies such as AI, defence and security, biotech, energy and quantum computing has become a more pressing concern in the wake of a range of global disruptions through the early 2020s.
Along with broad supply chain breakdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, the geopolitical environment has become more fraught. Escalating trade wars, the imposition of sweeping import tariffs in the US and heightening tensions between America and China have thrown globalised networks into question. Alongside those challenges, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) directives have placed an increased onus on supply chain leaders to sanitise their supply networks against modern slavery, conflict minerals, and indirectly sourcing materials from rogue nations. The case for establishing redundancies in supply, as well as heightening visibility on an end-to-end supply basis, was thus clear amongst the panel.
“Koray, you work with a lot of different companies,” began Villablanca. “Do you think there’s a mindset issue where politics and commerciality need to come together to realise the common goal and create resilient supply chains?”
“Directly, there probably is a mindset issue,” Köse replied. “I think there is a lack of clarity about the importance of geopolitics’ impact upon supply chains, and there is certainly the capability issue of understanding the context of geopolitics.” He then elaborated on the challenge by highlighting shortfalls in companies’ predictive capabilities.
“Companies operate with risk dashboards,” he continued. “Sometimes it’s just red, yellow, green, and that’s all you have. They have a few key risk indicators like financial compliance issues, quality issues, performance issues, but you never see strategic foresight. It’s retroactive, based on historical numbers. If you look at a production line it might say, ‘We didn’t have an incident for 80 days’. What if somebody were to say, ‘We won’t have an incident in the next 100 or 80 days’? You don’t see that in production; it always looks backwards because it is built on the past.
“A big problem in a lot of the military complex, and in politics, is thinking that the next war will be like the last one. They cannot necessarily understand that asymmetric, hybrid and proxy warfare is really where things are going, and the same goes for technology. Supply chains are often built on yesterday’s technology.”
To then end, he believes supply chain leaders should be more forthright in leveraging their profound influence upon business operations: “In supply chain, we see the conversation about having a ‘seat at the table’ for decades now and I always say, ‘Just bring your own freaking table’, and invite everybody to it. Everything, every cent in an organisation, goes through you. Own that leverage and don’t run after them, invite them to come to you. Your table is where value is generated, secured and innovation and competitiveness are established. You hold the fate of the future.”
As to politics’ place within meeting this challenge, Villablanca asked Ellwood whether the political sphere could be doing more to shape the corporate agenda.
“Yes, and that last point you said is the most critical; recognising that there is a massive risk, that this is a very different world that we’re now facing, and I expect the point that’s really being made is the absence of politicians,” he said. “The politicians themselves need to be told what we need because their expertise in understanding this arena is poor.
“China now owns the periodic table. If you are into silicon wafers, where’s your serum going to come from? If you’re into magnets, where’s your Europium going to come from? You need to know this sort of detail, and it’s not just you yourself. It’s your suppliers and the suppliers of your suppliers, too.”
While supply chain transparency has undoubtedly increased in recent years, he stressed that considerable work remains to realise total visibility.
“At a recent procurement event I was astonished at how many household names were unaware of what their second and third-tier partners were doing during the procurement cycle,” Ellwood continued. “They didn’t understand the vulnerabilities, down to the SMEs, of what’s going on. If the assembly line stops then that’s quite serious, but what’s going to happen because of that stress?
“There are people who don’t understand it over here, not recognising that our competitors are deliberately looking at our supply chains and working out where that vulnerability lies. It is so that Ford stops making trucks, so that pharmaceuticals stop making medicines. Ministers are ignorant about this and we need to become better at it. This is the frontline of the next war that we’ll fight, and that war is coming.”
“I would add that some can’t fathom the complexity of certain supply chains and the vulnerability and risk associated with multiple tiers within them,” Villablanca posited. “There’s probably a translation issue with regards to business and politics around supply chain.”
To this, Ellwood stressed that international government groups hold the keys to unlocking a broader understanding within members’ respective political spheres.
“The G7, the Five Eyes Alliance, this is where these conversations need to go,” said Ellwood. “To recognise this must be a priority within the western world, we now need to have an alternative source to make sure that we can build our aircraft, we can build our factories, we can build our products. It isn’t so much the rare earth minerals themselves, but it’s the processing. Setting up a processing factory for rare earth minerals takes almost a decade.”
Here, a guest interjected with a point that hearkened back to Ellwood’s own admission that politicians have an innate directive to focus on local, vote-winning issues: “Politicians recognise there are no votes in this. The average MP will say their inbox is full of ‘fix the NHS’, ‘get the roads fixed’.”
Resolving political challenges such as those, Ellwood replied, is predicated upon strengthening economies to open fiscal headroom for public investment.
“If our economy is affected by problems with our supply chains, there’ll be no money in the treasury,” he explained. “Not for health, transport, potholes, policing, defence. It’s imperative that if you want to fill the coffers, then we need to protect ourselves. You can only do that with supply chain resilience. As a politician, you’ve got to take the people with you if you want to make the case.”
Villablanca then repositioned the conversation with regards to pressing issues around sustainability.
“There’s a lot of risk associated with our supply chains that goes beyond geopolitics,” she said. “We also have climate issues, economic issues. How do we maintain sovereignty in our supply chains while still trying to pursue goals around sustainability?”
“Supply chain transparency is something that I advocated for when I was a young consultant in the early 2000s when my hair was not so grey,” said Machholz, highlighting the gradual shift in supply chain priorities around identifying the finer details across those networks. “It isn’t a new topic and in the EU we now have the Critical Raw Materials Act.
Machholz drew the conversation towards sustainability in the context of integrity and continuity. “I’m German, and what we have is engineering power. We are good at car and machine manufacturing, but we have no natural resources. We have a little bit of coal, but all other things need to be imported. There have to be some sources to get those things.
“There’s Trump and tariffs going up and down, and we have some other geopolitical tensions affecting supply. You might say, ‘Where do I source this particular thing from? We don’t really have a second source of supply, because both of these sources are located in the same geographical spot.’ Maybe both of them are coming out of China.”
For Machholz, lessons to be gleaned around forecasting with technology’s latest predictive capabilities were presented en masse by the pandemic. “If we look at COVID, almost all supply chains were disrupted and you were running out of materials,” he continued. “You needed to be much more risk alert, and this is the problem we have already touched on: not looking in the back mirror, but using your data and turning insights into foresights to see what could happen, and then being agile and adapting.
“Sustainability could be one thing, having several sources, having alternatives, but of course, especially if we’re talking about critical raw materials, critical parts or maybe patent-protected or monopolistic suppliers, we are in an ambitious situation, put it that way, to find some alternatives.”
Machholz stressed: “This is something that each supply chain manager, CPO, and CFO, needs to understand to set boards’ scenarios. I’m pretty sure with the help of artificial intelligence we can elaborate much more on our data and predict different scenarios so we can be more prepared rather than just reactive.”
Shifting from cost-cutting to resilience
Of course, supply chain executives are under siege from an enormous breadth of challenges, whether it’s geopolitics, technological evolution as both a benefit and a threat, and shifts in consumer behaviours precipitated by those same factors. Rising to meet those challenges on all fronts, especially in a business landscape that often adheres to cost optimisation and efficiency over investing in resilience, can give rise to decision paralysis or financially-stymied strategies.
Turning to Köse, Villablanca asked: “There’s a mountain of black swan events lurking around us, ready to attack at any minute. What are the things that a supply chain leader should be focusing on today to try to build resilience?”
“To be honest, I don’t think they’re looking at building resilience,” said Köse. “What they’re doing right now is cost optimisation, looking at inflation and making sure that the profit margins are going to be protected through the bottom line, not considering top line revenue maximisation.
“I think agility and economics always need to come back to top line, which basically means in the context of normal business 101 you are producing something, that there is a want and a need and a willingness to pay, and not necessarily hyper-focusing on the cost line or saying, ‘I’m not going to produce a bunch of bullshit that nobody’s going to pay for, just because I got to claim savings to my CFO’.”
“I’m going to challenge you there,” Villablanca interjected. “I think, theoretically, that’s great, but everybody in this room is running a business. We have our own boards, people above us, board directors and so on saying, at the end of the day, you are remunerated and we are all remunerated for our quotas. How do you deal with the day-to-day management of your business as well as building that kind of resilience, agility and visibility?”
To this, Köse stressed that the difference can be made by reframing how businesses examine and counteract risk. “We’re thinking about turning the tide by really embedding foresight in risk indicators. Those risk indicators need to incorporate geotechnical, geostrategic issues with foresight,” he continued before highlighting what he implied to be a tendency for organisations to bury their heads in the sand when faced with developing geopolitical challenges.
“I published an article before Russia invaded Ukraine, about Russia getting ready to invade Ukraine, that went through loads of red tape and debate internally that calling Russia an aggressor was cancelled out from the research note,” said Köse. “They said, ‘You can’t say that’ while it was pretty obvious that Russia were clearly the aggressors.
“The supply chain-focused function needs to spread out and have these geopolitical indicators, geotech-related risk indicators, and not just the last financial report from your supplier A to Z or tier one or tier two.
“We must then tie it back to the value and revenue you’re generating. Get away from this hyper focus and obsession with savings. In that context, make your analytics smarter with a bold analysis of things that you feel uncomfortable about. Think about ‘what now?’ and think about politics. I know we eradicated politics out of business as much as we eradicated many other beliefs from the conversation, but it has to come back.”
With this in mind, he proposed that cost optimisation is to an organisation’s detriment where resilience is concerned, not to its security. “Your indicators for success are not just on the cost line item or bottom line. Your priority must be on the top line. If I sell more, I can grow. With cost optimisation you can shrink yourself to death. That’s what some countries have done with political reviews where you shrink this, you shrink that, let’s shrink here, let’s shrink there. Potholes, collapsing bridges and rail systems, come because of the shrinkage of your investment budget for public infrastructure, for example. What I have found in the last decade of the sustainability high is that it actually impeded resilience, while the narrative said it was supposed to increase resilience.”
To this, Machholz highlighted the data behind Köse’s comments that resilience offers heightened growth potential than cost-cutting measures.
“There were some studies from McKinsey which showed that companies who are investing in risk management are 4.7 times more profitable than those who don’t,” Machholz shared, stressing that businesses engaged in this mindset are missing growth opportunities.
“People just fall back and say, ‘Okay, now the risk is over, COVID is over, whatever event is over,” he continued. “‘We can just go back to business as usual’. Resilience is just extra cost, extra inventory, maybe a second supply chain that needs attention, money, and people to take care of it, and they just simply don’t do it. This is, I think, one of the big threats that we are all facing.”
Exiger Executive Forum: A closer look
The Exiger Executive Forum (EEF) in London is a global think tank that brings together elite independent voices from strategy, policy, technology and business to equip leaders with the frameworks and foresight needed to navigate the multipolar era. The EEF is exclusively curated for industry experts, analysts, policy makers, and senior procurement and supply chain decision-makers through Exiger, a market-leading supply chain AI company. The next Exiger Executive Forum ‘War-time Economics: How Europe’s €800BN Defence Spend Will Reshape Supply Chains’ will take place in London on Thursday, September 18th, 2025.
Ellwood concurred that this lack of foresight and willingness to invest in protective supply chain measures leaves businesses undefended against interruptions both foreseen and not. “We need to prepare ourselves for unexpected events to happen as the norm,” he said. “What would happen to any business if it didn’t have power for 72 hours? How would you look after your personnel? How do you make sure you salvage the business so that, after 72 hours, you can get back up and running. These aren’t questions that we naturally posed at the moment because again, we tend to park these things.
“The mentality may be, ‘The world certainly feels like it’s getting dangerous, but my life actually looks okay.’ That isn’t the right attitude. If you go to Sweden or Finland, who are much closer to the war with Russia, they are preparing in a way that we are not for a major event or incident. It may well be that when something happens and it’s the moment where governments wake up, but you shouldn’t be waiting for that moment.”
Villablanca then highlighted the recent, universal example of poor supply chain resilience bringing business, both domestic and international, to a grinding halt. “Did we learn nothing from COVID?” she asked. “Did we not take the opportunity to stress test our supply chains and look for the vulnerabilities within multiple layers?”
In response, Ellwood invited guests to consider whether the muscle developed in response to COVID’s interruptions had been allowed to atrophy. “I think that’s a question for everybody; how much of that was retained?” he asked before blending the conversation of supply chain agility with the potential for organisations to support national security should their respective nations go to war.
“During COVID, supply opportunities came about,” he said. “Everyone here today represents diverse businesses. What services do you provide that you could tweak or add value to where something else has fallen short?
“That’s where life really becomes interesting because that’s what happened in the First and Second World Wars. We called on organisations that previously had no interest in helping out with the war effort to add support and value to the wider machine and protect ourselves from a resilience perspective.”
Challenges faced by supply chains, he explained, have analogues to business that clearly marry the political and business spheres: “When we say ‘war effort’ today, it isn’t just Army, Air Force, Navy, air, land and sea. It’s now cyber, it’s space, it’s coastguard, it’s AI. This greater warfare is where a lot of the real pain will happen. As happened in COVID, it’s going to be the clever people in the industry that step forward to say, ‘I’ve already thought about this’. They’re in the patent-esque mode, they’ve done the work to say, with a few tweaks here and there, give us some extra money, and I can alter what I’m producing to provide a solution.”
The roles of government and industry
While there are clear precedents for, and incoming needs to, prioritise supply chain resilience in both the political and business spheres, the conversation made it clear that a unified front stands to offer the most impact.
The challenge, particularly in a political environment preoccupied with economic stabilisation, increased productivity, and soothed international relations, is identifying a shared north star or galvanising body to lead the shared project.
Striking at the heart of the conversation, one guest posited: “If we want to align supply chain and geopolitics moving forward with a mutually-reinforcing relationship and shared goals, joint risk assessment, a focus on resilience over efficiency, and heightened cross-disciplinary talent and data, what are the forward steps?
“What can we within industry do in partnership with governments to move this forward?”
Representing the political voice, Ellwood replied: “There are certainly supply chain improvements that you can do on a national, sovereign basis. But from where I sit, there is a wide political threat that we face and are losing right now. One of them is to do with the energy supply, and another is the threat of AI. The quantum race will be won or lost in the next five years’ time, and that will be game-changing. It simply means that if the winner can harness the power of computing on that scale, everything’s over.”
Ellwood then invoked the technological advancements made in modern wartime, stressing that political figures must wield the mindset of those times to accelerate progress.
“I would like to see some two or three Manhattan Project equivalents, if you like, to ask, ‘How do we harness modular nuclear power?’,” he said. “That’s a very easy way to keep our lights on locally. Then, how do you harness AI? Let’s make sure it is this side of the world that wins that.
“Again, there isn’t that coordination, that sense of urgency, because it’s too far down the road,” he concluded, then highlighting that opposing forces on the world stage already have the unified capabilities that many Western nations lack. “State, industry, and academia in China, for example, are all morphed into one and that gives them huge benefits in the race for these key arenas.”
Köse elaborated on this point by highlighting Turkey’s effective coalescence of business and government.
“If you think about the private-public national defence sector in Turkey, it came from being totally dependent on the US armoury to a leading innovator of drone wars,” Köse explained. “When you think about asymmetric warfare, innovative, impactful and economic weaponry, from drones to secure soldier transportation and all of that, think about what Turkey is producing right now in technology compared to others. The headway Turkey experienced in the last decade in the defence sector is unprecedented.
“That private-public sector coalition and symbiosis has covered such a need for them in a decade that many are surprised. I think that is something that Europe has to relearn, because Europe thinks a lot about public sector dominance in an area where the private sector should actually take charge. In the US, it’s the opposite. They say, ‘keep the public sector out’. The solution lies in collaboration and bringing each sectors strength to the table while leaving out their weaknesses and flaws.
While of course not advocating for adopting the political model, he agreed with Ellwood that nations like China have an innate advantage in this race. “When you think about the way that the autocratic countries are going about it, it’s the public sector dominating the private sector environment,” he said. “That’s why they’re so hyperfocused on things and they can scale but not necessarily innovate in this sector.
“I love the government when it’s in the right place to actually do something positive and impactful. But when I’m exposed to it, I usually get anxiety issues due to the lack of pragmatism, innovation and agility. But hopefully there’s this convergence of politics, business and academia driving intelligence into critical sectors and industry, and we’re trying to drive it through this think tank here.”
The unified case for supply chain sovereignty
Exiger’s Supply Chain Sovereignty in a Fractured World event was an enlightening review of the supply chain landscape and the myriad challenges and stakeholders it encompasses.
While the panellists’ conversation in many ways highlighted the disconnect between government, business, and academia, the resonating message was one of shared pressures and goals. Where governments have pulled back on the reins of public spending, many organisations have in kind adopted a cost-optimisation mindset that may protect the bottom line but opens the door to heightened vulnerability.
Where governments must consider challenges around energy sovereignty and insulating populations against the breakdown of globalised networks – as was demonstrated upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – supply chain executives must create redundancies to cover lapses and minimise potential disruptions to production and wider organisational integrity.
The guests’ final comment, that states which can marry both the public and private spheres towards shared interests, neatly encapsulates the urgency with which those worlds must reunite. While much work remains to enmesh those spheres, it is clear that the conversation is progressing at pace.
