Gartner Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo 2026 Orlando: Day 2 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo, taking place this week in Orlando, Florida. Below is a collection of the key announcements and insights coming out of the conference. 

On Day 2 from the conference, we are highlighting sessions on CEO concerns for 2026, agentic AI in procurement and supply chain orchestration. Be sure to check this page throughout the day for updates.

• Gartner Highlights Three Building Blocks for Autonomous Supply Chain Future

• Gartner Predicts Supply Chain Organizations Pausing Entry-Level Hiring for AI Will Face Higher Costs by 2030

Presented by Atul Dighe, VP Analyst, Gartner  

As CEOs pursue growth, margin improvement and AI-led transformation, they are contending with an environment defined by geopolitical disruption and weak organizational trust. In this session, Atul Dighe, VP Analyst at Gartner, shared the latest insights from the annual Gartner Global CEO survey, highlighting the agenda shifts CSCOs should anticipate, and how they can enable supply-chain-driven business success.

• “CEOs remain focused on growth and technology, but many lack strategic clarity as uncertainty, institutional lag, and uneven AI payback complicate decision making.”

• “Geopolitics has surged as a CEO concern, rising to a top-three business priority.”  

• “CEOs are actively rebalancing their geographic footprints, with 76% entering or expanding markets and 40% reducing or exiting markets to pursue growth, resilience and diversification.”

• “CSCOs can help most by influencing the C-suite with stronger storytelling, applying a value lens to current activities, and leading return-on-the-future initiatives tied to business and financial outcomes.”
  
  Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with the Gartner analyst by contacting Justin Lavelle at justin.lavelle@gartner.com.

Presented by Meghan O'Doherty, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner

As agentic AI captures outsized attention, procurement leaders need a clearer view of what is hype and what is real. In this session, Meghan O'Doherty, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, shared how procurement teams can prepare to use agentic AI to drive greater strategic impact.

• “AI agents and agentic AI are not the same: agents can perform bounded tasks autonomously or semi-autonomously, while agentic AI uses compound, multiagent systems to automate broader workflows and pursue goals across processes.”

• “There is a major disconnect between what people think agentic AI can do, what it can reliably do, and what vendor demos currently show, which is why only a small minority of procurement functions are actively pursuing it today.”

• “The most practical near-term opportunities are in targeted sourcing and procurement use cases, while longer-term value will depend on stronger data quality, clearer methods for measuring returns, and preparing for impacts to the workforce.”

• “To compete and win, procurement leaders should: 

  • Press vendors for clear agent roadmaps 

  • Prioritize use cases based on business need rather than hype 

  • Guard against agent-washing 

  • Prepare the organization to scale AI beyond pilots”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with the Gartner analyst by contacting Justin Lavelle at justin.lavelle@gartner.com.

Presented by Caleb Thomson, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner

As supply chain leaders pursue faster decisions, better coordination and stronger performance, orchestration is emerging as a compelling but still maturing capability. Caleb Thomson, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, explained that orchestration can improve performance, but only when organizations target the right sources of friction, build the necessary foundations and scale capabilities in stages.

• “Supply chain orchestration is the coordination and optimization of activities across end-to-end networks to align operational execution with strategic goals.”

• “Orchestration creates value by reducing execution friction, cross-functional friction and ecosystem friction, turning slow, fragmented or siloed responses into faster, more coordinated action.”

• “The journey to orchestration is cumulative rather than instantaneous, as organizations extend from control-tower and command-center capabilities toward broader enterprise and ecosystem coordination through hybrid architectures instead of a single platform answer.”

• “The vision for AI-driven orchestration is real, but most organizations are not ready to scale it yet because of low data quality, limited organizational readiness and immature workflows which still constrain AI effectiveness and adoption.”

• “The practical path forward is to start with friction, not platforms, validate the data needed to improve decisions, prove value in narrower use cases and then expand toward cross-functional, enterprise and ecosystem orchestration over time.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with the Gartner analyst by contacting Justin Lavelle at justin.lavelle@gartner.com.