Disruption isn’t new. What has changed is that it is no longer temporary; it is structural, woven into the daily fabric of how companies operate. A single policy change can shift sourcing overnight, while a viral trend can empty store shelves faster than a forecast can catch up. With technology advancing rapidly, the conversation about Artificial Intelligence intensifies daily.
AI has become the defining accelerator of adaptability, not its driver. In a world of constant geopolitical and economic turbulence, companies can’t afford to chase hype or experiment in isolation. The real differentiator will be how effectively they orchestrate intelligence across the enterprise, turning data into continuous, connected decisions that convert volatility into advantage.
Resilience helps organizations survive disruption, while adaptability helps them thrive because of it. AI is real, and it is powerful, but its true value lies in enabling that adaptability, not replacing it.
AI Is Accelerating but Architecture Is Lagging
Recent Kinaxis research with The Economist Group revealed a sharp contrast – 71 percent of executives said their companies have accelerated AI development, yet only 22 percent of them believe their current architecture can support it. This disconnect defines the challenge ahead.
Leaders are racing to deploy AI, but their data, governance, and processes were never designed for continuous adaptation. The result is expected: fragmented tools, conflicting recommendations, and planners spending more time reconciling dashboards than making decisions.
From Control to Orchestration
For decades, supply chains were built for control, with stability, efficiency, and cost in mind. In a world of constant volatility, however, control has become an illusion. The next stage of progress lies in orchestration, breaking down functional silos and connecting every partner around shared, live decisions that evolve in real time.
Orchestration is the bridge between control and adaptability. It creates alignment and visibility that allow a supply chain to sense change, simulate outcomes, and act continuously rather than periodically. Those capabilities define the adaptive supply chain, a connected system designed to evolve at the pace of volatility.
Five capabilities make it real:
- Planning at the Core – Planning is no longer a scheduled activity, but the enterprise nervous system that connects strategy and execution.
- One Model, One Truth – Ensuring every function works from the same live data and assumptions, so alignment becomes structural rather than aspirational.
- Continuous Adaptation – Disruptions do not wait for monthly reviews – adaptive supply chains adjust as change happens.
- Agentic Acceleration – Adding intelligent agents to handle routine sensing, simulation, and exception management so humans can focus on judgment, governance, and value.
- Value-Centric Leadership – Keeping adaptability grounded in purpose and ensuring every decision balances growth, margin, sustainability, and resilience.
These capabilities are already delivering measurable results, from life sciences manufacturers using agents to prevent expiry-related losses to high-tech leaders reallocating production within hours of a demand spike.
Governance Builds the Trust That Makes AI Work
AI’s promise comes with risk. Poorly governed systems can make fast, but flawed decisions, such as over-ordering, breaking compliance, or eroding margin. Governance must be built in, not bolted on. Every recommendation should be explainable – what triggered it, what trade-offs were considered, and why it is the right move. Every decision should be auditable, and every agent must operate within clear guardrails for ethics, compliance, and financial integrity.
AI does not replace human accountability; it extends it. Governance builds trust that turns speed into confidence and ensures adaptability does not come at the expense of integrity.
The next horizon extends beyond supply chain. When adaptability reaches finance, workforce, and logistics, the business begins to move as one. That is the vision of the orchestrated enterprise, where decisions in one domain immediately reflect in another, eliminating lag and unlocking competitiveness.
The AI conversation will keep evolving. Some technologies will fade, while others will endure. What matters most for leaders is clarity, knowing which innovations build lasting adaptability and which add noise.
The companies that win the next decade will not be those that automate the fastest, but those that adapt the fastest, turning disruption into advantage and uncertainty into leadership.
Fabrizio (Fab) Brasca is Senior Vice President of Market Strategy at Kinaxis, where he leads the company’s global market strategy across product marketing, supply chain execution, and ecosystem orchestration.
A seasoned supply chain executive, Fab brings more than two decades of experience spanning product marketing, product management, sales, and strategy. At Kinaxis, he is responsible for shaping and amplifying the company’s go-to-market vision – connecting product innovation, customer value, and ecosystem collaboration to drive the future of supply chain orchestration. His team leads initiatives across messaging, thought leadership, analyst relations, competitive intelligence, and go-to-market alignment in supply chain execution and partner strategy.
Before joining Kinaxis, Fab held executive leadership roles at Blue Yonder and FourKites, where he helped organizations build and scale supply chain solutions that enable real-time visibility, optimization, and adaptability. Earlier in his career, he spent more than a decade at i2 Technologies, where he helped shape the company’s global transportation and logistics strategy.
Fab is a recognized thought leader on supply chain transformation and the evolving intersection of AI, automation, and human decision-making. He holds an Honours Bachelor of Mathematics, with a specialization in business and information systems, from the University of Waterloo in Canada.