Blue Yonder’s second annual Supply Chain Compass report paints a picture of growing unease among supply chain executives even as technology adoption accelerates. According to the 2026 survey of nearly 700 supply chain professionals across North America and Europe, fewer leaders now say their organisations are ready for the future , 66% in 2026 versus 73% the year before , while just under half of respondents (46%) describe themselves as highly optimistic about the future of their su...
Continue Reading This Article
Enjoy this article as well as all of our content, including reports, news, tips and more.
By registering or signing into your SRM Today account, you agree to SRM Today's Terms of Use and consent to the processing of your personal information as described in our Privacy Policy.
pply chains. The report was summarised in industry coverage by ITS Supply Chain and Blue Yonder’s own release.
The research exposes a sharp confidence divide. Among those who identify as highly optimistic, 87% believe their organisations are prepared for future challenges; among less optimistic leaders that figure falls to 48%. Optimistic leaders are also more likely to adopt an end-to-end perspective, break down functional silos, prioritise collaboration and allocate dedicated technology budgets, the report finds. Those behaviours correlate with stronger expectations for financial performance.
Operational efficiency remains the dominant strategic objective for 2026, with 35% of leaders selecting improving efficiency and productivity as their top priority. A notable shift is the rapid rise of decision speed: faster, better decision-making climbed to the number two strategic priority after ranking seventh in the prior year’s study, reflecting mounting pressure on teams to resolve problems more quickly and at greater scale.
Technology trends highlighted in the Compass underline how those priorities are being pursued. Unified data platforms are now the most widely deployed new technology, in place at 51% of organisations. Machine learning and predictive AI are in use at 45% of respondents, generative AI adoption has doubled since 2025 to 24%, while agentic AI remains nascent at 8%. Blue Yonder’s inaugural Compass and related company materials similarly emphasised technology and improved demand planning as central to leaders’ ambitions. Coverage of NRF 2026 also pointed to growing interest in agentic AI and the importance of partnerships to tackle complex supply‑chain problems.
But technological progress has not erased vulnerability. The Compass shows that response capability varies by disruption type, with geopolitical events proving hardest to tackle rapidly: only 20% of respondents can develop and deploy a response within 24 hours, and 38% take longer than a week. That lag underlines the difference between having tools available and being organised to act decisively under time pressure.
Blue Yonder’s chief executive, Duncan Angove, framed the findings in terms of decision-making infrastructure. “Supply chain leaders are being asked to make more decisions, more frequently and with less time available,” he said in the company announcement. “In supply chain management, confidence is not simply a mindset. It is built on end-to-end visibility, unified data and practical AI that allows teams to make good decisions quickly and at scale. Blue Yonder enables companies to link together planning, sourcing and execution functions so they can reduce decision fatigue, rapidly respond to disruptions and manage the business with more control.”
The wider market context suggests these technology investments are part of a rapid expansion in digital supply‑chain capability. Market research projects the digital supply‑chain and logistics technology market to more than double from about USD 72 billion in 2025 to roughly USD 147 billion by 2031, driven by automation, collaborative logistics networks and cloud-based deployments. That growth, noted in industry analysis, reinforces why many organisations are accelerating spend even as senior leaders express uncertainty about readiness and resilience.
For companies seeking to close the emerging confidence gap, the Compass implies two linked priorities: deepen data integration across planning and execution, and focus investments that shorten decision cycles. Firms that pair unified data platforms with practical AI workloads and clear operating routines appear, in the survey’s findings, to be best positioned to both weather disruption and translate technology spend into improved performance.
Source: Noah Wire Services
