5 Takeaways from Gartner Supply Chain Symposium: How Leading Companies Are Turning Supply Chain Into a Growth Engine

1. Volatility Is No Longer a Phase. It's the New Normal.

Stop planning for disruption as if it's temporary. The companies pulling ahead right now aren't the ones with the best crisis response playbooks, they're the ones that have rebuilt their supply chains to operate proactively during volatility, not around it.

Volatility is no longer episodic. It's become structural. Geopolitics, tariffs, inflation, shifting consumer behavior, and AI are all colliding at once—with each force amplifying the next, adding new layers of complexity and opportunity.

For Danielle, a real source of disruption isn't always macro outward factors, it's closer to home, "I think about the disruption not coming necessarily from technology alone. It's coming from consumer behavior.” Companies that get too fixated on internal operations risk losing sight of that signal entirely.

If your supply chain strategy is still built around absorbing shocks after they hit, you're solving yesterday's problem. The companies winning are the ones staying closest to their customers."

2. Efficiency Is Not the End Game. Growth Is.

Most supply chain investments get justified with a cost savings number. That framing is limiting, and according to Danielle, it's exactly what keeps companies stuck.

Not having a resilient supply chain is costly. And so the reaction to that is, let's become more efficient. Efficiency is good, but it’s not the end game. Growth is really the end game.

The better mental model is a flywheel. Efficiency frees up capital. That capital funds innovation. Innovation drives customer demand. Demand deepens retailer relationships. And stronger retailer relationships create more shelf presence, more distribution, more growth.

"At the end of the day, it's innovation," Danielle said. "The consumer wants freshness, newness. They want a modern experience, and they want to have a connection to a brand. That can't happen without an effective supply chain."

That connection between supply chain excellence and brand equity is exactly what Combe built their transformation around. You can spend years improving efficiency gains — fixing manual processes and stitching systems together — and those investments will matter. But efficiency alone won't move the growth needle. As Danielle put it, "You can dwell there and never grow. It's the profitable growth that we're after."

3. A Clean Digital Core Is the Foundation. Not the Finish Line.

Chasing growth doesn't mean skipping the foundational work, it means doing it with intention. There's a temptation to jump straight to AI, agents, and autonomous orchestration. But Combe's story is a timely reminder that none of that works without a clean digital core underneath it. The difference is framing: this isn't efficiency for efficiency's sake, it's building the infrastructure that makes growth possible.

Combe strategically consolidated ERPs, unified their data, and built a connected digital backbone. Not just to cut costs, but to create the conditions for everything that comes next. "The journey to the digital core is usually around unification," Danielle said. "It's about getting the benefits of the cloud, and investing behind SaaS partners that have built-in innovation cycles — that, particularly in the mid-size enterprise world, you don't want to have to build yourself."

This strategic order of operations paid off.

Now we have one connected backbone, one team, one mission. We are now unified as an organization.

Combe isn't the only one seeing the payoff. Century Supply Chain Solutions scaled their annual EDI transactions by 300% after consolidating their integration infrastructure using Cleo.

That strong foundation is what Combe is now building on. For organizations that try to layer intelligence on top of fragmented data and siloed systems, they will build in complexities and eventually have to rewind their process and start over. Clean data and unified processes aren't the destination, they're what makes the destination reachable.

4. Bringing AI Agents Into the Enterprise Requires a Trust Leap.

The technology is ready. The C-suite is bought in. So what's actually slowing agentic AI down in the enterprise? Trust.

The step change in bringing agents into the enterprise is that you have to suspend some amount of control and allow the technology to drive decisions for you, with the recognition that the complexity is really beyond the realm of human intervention alone.

She made the stakes concrete with an example from her career. During COVID, a company Danielle worked with was running promotions and optimizing inventory algorithmically, all while their stores were closed and during non-shopping hours. The machine didn't know that detail and spend kept going out the door. The failure wasn't the technology, it was the absence of human context working alongside it.

That tension points to a harder problem: how do you measure the value of redesigned work? Traditional ROI metrics don't map cleanly onto systems that change how decisions get made. "When you redesign work, there isn't necessarily a metric that says this AI solution got you this return," Danielle said. "We have to expand our thinking.”

For leaders, that means ROI can't just be tied to a single tool — it has to account for whether the organization has genuinely made that trust leap and the results. Did your teams change how they work? Have decision making cycles gotten faster and more confident? Are humans and machines actually operating together? Those are the real indicators that the technology is delivering.

5. The Human Role Is Changing, Not Disappearing.

The most loaded question in any AI conversation is the one nobody wants to ask out loud. What happens to our people?

The answer isn’t as dire as the headlines suggest. The shift isn't elimination, it's repositioning. The operating model is moving from human-led, technology-assisted work to human-supervised, agent-driven operations. Smaller, more cross functional teams with greater connectivity. Agents handling execution and routine decisioning, while humans focus on judgment, context, and strategy.

We're redesigning how we work. We're embedding intelligence into decision-making and putting humans into a contextual role.

The mindset shift for employees is significant. Stop getting hung up on tasks and start thinking about outcomes. “Some of that can be automated”, she said. "Let me free up some mind space to actually think about what else we can do to get our company to the next level."

For leaders, technology is only half the equation. The other half is building an organization that actually knows how to use it — new metrics, new team structures, operator knowledge, and people who understand their role in a world where agents are making decisions alongside them."