Leaders Forum 2025: Rewiring NextGen Growth

Last month, we held our annual Supply Chain Leaders Forum in Barcelona. 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 conference was Rewiring NextGen Growth. Despite the uncertainty these leaders have faced this year, the general vibe felt markedly reenergized.

Operational leaders that invested in resilience, agility and adaptability over the last few years have found they can scenario plan and pivot quickly to best options, depending on how conditions in the broader trade and operating environments unfold.

As part of this year’s event, we touched on three subthemes: NextGen Impact Organizations, NextGen Antifragile Models and NextGen Partnerships for Growth.

NextGen Impact Organizations scale the use of AI and automation for productivity and profitable growth. This theme also covered leadership and talent, in the context of technology and generational change.

NextGen Antifragile Models spanned how we navigate the risks and opportunities of a multipolar world and position for more disruption-proof, growth-enabled trade flows. It also explored how we leverage broader ecosystems for greater flexibility and resilience.

Finally, NextGen Partnerships for Growth covered enabling disruptive innovation in products and services, driving value for customers that hits their top and bottom lines and leveraging value-based sustainability ecosystems.

We had a prestigious line up of executive speakers at this year’s event that included keynotes from Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft and two executive panels on the future of energy and global trade. 

Here are some key takeaways from keynotes and group discussions at this year’s event:

• Several leaders spoke about progress in proliferating AI assistants and evolving some into agents that perform more complex functions such as optimizing global infrastructure capacity and troubleshooting quality issues with manufacturing sites and suppliers.
• Using AI tools, one member was able to more than double revenue while holding supply chain headcount flat over the past three years.
• A life sciences manufacturer pursuing efficiencies across multiple acquired businesses, found that the cultural aspects of Lean management are critical to success – leaders “walking the floor” to better understand the baseline environment, staying focused on targeted outcomes and aligning frontline worker incentives with continuous improvements.

• One member manages a radar screen of top enterprise risks and conducts table-top exercises and influence campaigns through its CEO, government affairs, industry groups and supply ecosystems to shape regulations and trade policy.
• A global trade panel spanning the retail, CP and high-tech sectors highlighted opportunities revealed by recent trade volatility. These included using AI to optimize a digital twin of product designation codes and sourcing locations, tariff engineering bills of materials, and promoting portfolio simplification with commercial teams.
• A panel on energy powering supply chains explored what’s real versus hype in the energy industry –e.g., solar is now cost competitive without subsidy in some markets, hydrogen is more hype as compared to biofuels and small modular reactors are transformative and scaling.

• A CP company is finding win-wins with customers and contributing to joint top and bottom lines. Examples include detailed customer sales pattern analysis with future improvement suggestions and shared logistics to increase joint fleet utilization.
• A life sciences company has built a scalable ecosystem of solutions around its products to enable improved patient outcomes, clinician surgical performances and hospital network efficiency.
• In a roundtable session, several member companies shared how they are driving innovation with ecosystem partners and new suppliers, such as hosting product/innovation day events to stimulate start-up activity and focusing investments on novel solutions.

It was an inspiring two days together at Leaders Forum. We are excited to reconvene this esteemed group of leaders at our co-hosted North American and European Leaders in Action events later this year.

Stan Aronow
VP Distinguished Advisor
Gartner Supply Chain
Stan.Aronow@gartner.com