Advancing the Mind, Body and Soul of Sentient Operations

Gartner recently held its annual Leaders Forum in London. It was an exciting in-person reunion for our community of COOs and heads of large global supply chains.

The theme of this year’s event was Sentient Operations, reflecting a dramatic leap forward for operations where leaders no longer view technology as a tool for static automation, but are designing supply chains to act as dynamic, sensing, self-healing systems.

And while the drumbeat of technology is unmistakable in our day-to-day, we used a very human frame for this year’s subthemes — exploring our collective journey toward sentient operations, using the analogy of the mind, body and soul.

Here are some key takeaways from our keynotes and discussions.

A significant shift discussed this year was the transition from an "automation" to an "autonomous" mindset. Leaders are moving away from processes built for a stable world toward more agile, AI-augmented systems built to handle constant disruption.

• The Autonomous Shift: We discussed using a structured "decision stack" to map organizational decisions and determine where machines should act on their own. General Mills’ supply chain, led by Jon Ness, is a great example of an organization making this shift. They mapped every key decision in their supply chain, narrowing millions down to a core set that truly drives performance. From there, leaders decide how much human oversight is needed for each decision and codify that into system-based workflows.
• Agentic Architecture: Meri Stevens, COO for Kenvue, shared her vision of a "ladder of agents" performing local tasks but reporting up into an enterprise-wide AI command center. Several other members shared that they are deploying orchestration agents to coordinate across more specialized AI agents focused on narrower functions within order management, quality management and procurement, for instance.
• Essential Foundations: There is, of course, the massive catch that AI exposes and amplifies bad data and processes. Sally Gilligan, chief supply chain & transformation officer of Gap Inc., warned that bad data will instantly derail autonomous systems. Several of our speakers reemphasized the need to simplify and standardize processes before integrating AI into them.

The "body" of our supply chain — physical factories, warehouses and fleets, and the flows between them — is undergoing a profound re-engineering to protect our P&Ls and adapt to a BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible) world.

• Lights-Out Assets, Meshed Intelligence: Gartner anticipates a future where physical assets such as factories and DCs become nearly or entirely "lights out." Driven by robotics and ambient intelligence in edge applications, individual nodes of the network can take better decisions and actions, while cross-coordinating through meshed intelligence across nodes. Many of our most advanced high-tech, consumer product and retail members have created lighthouse instances of these highly autonomous environments.
• Capping Exposure, Increasing Optionality: Building physical resilience means actively managing geopolitical risks. Several community members have built structural network resilience by capping country exposure as a percentage of network capacity. They are also creating greater optionality to dynamically shift the source of supply across regions in response to disruptions. Ernest Nicolas, chief enterprise operations officer for HP, described this as redefining operational sovereignty through intelligent orchestration.
• Unlocking Business Opportunities Amid Disruption: Mike Mustian, supply chain president of ExxonMobil, shared a rapid pivot that his team made in concert with product development and commercial partners to reformulate automotive lubricant products impacted by the war in the Middle East. These types of high speed coordinated responses can often yield growth for the business, in addition to mitigating risk exposure.

Ultimately, a sentient supply chain cannot function without its soul. This is our driving purpose, our connectedness to one another and to something larger. It is about culture, relationships and bringing everyone along on the journey. It’s recognizing that by asking employees to rapidly adopt cognitive and physical AI, we’re taking a massive psychological leap into the unknown.

• Culture of Curiosity: Chuck Graham, chief supply chain officer for Cisco spoke about the need for a culture of curiosity, noting that “AI success is not about the technology but building a culture and organizational capability to harness the true benefit.”  A key element of Cisco’s approach includes leaders’ personal investment in, and rewarding employees for, the use of AI. It has also democratized the use of AI through access and a culture of learning.
• Broadscale, Gamified Upskilling: Willem Uijen, chief supply chain & operations officer at Unilever described how his organization is bridging the digital skills gap through a 100-hour, nine-month long "Digi-Edge" program. The course includes leading-edge tech skills, alongside domain and business skills such as financial acumen, systems thinking and stakeholder management. The program is opt-in versus mandated and uses gamification to draw high engagement and results. Five hundred students graduated in year one and 4,000 are signed up for year two.
• Building An Organizational Brand: Rick Tallant, EVP supply chain, contracting & procurement for Shell, is a long-time business leader and more recent supply chain leader. With this unique perspective, he sees the need for a fundamental rebrand of supply chain from a servant role to an orchestrator of business value — building trust and enhancing competitive edge through common business targets and scaled solutions.

It was an inspiring two days together in London. As we look ahead, the mandate is clear: a harmonized approach across the mind, body, and soul is required to build truly sentient operations.