What Supply Chain's Top Consulting Minds Really Think About AI

I've spent my career building partnerships across the supply chain software industry at o9 Solutions, Blue Yonder, and now ketteQ. In that time, I've sat in many rooms with many smart people. But when I look back at ketteQuest 2026 in Atlanta, the partner panel we hosted on the final morning of the conference stands out as one of the most honest, most energizing supply chain conversations I have ever had the privilege of facilitating.

We didn't script it. We didn't rehearse it. We put five of the sharpest consulting minds in supply chain on a stage, asked them hard questions, and got out of the way. What followed was 45 minutes of unfiltered perspective from people who are deep in the trenches every day, guiding some of the world's largest and most complex supply chain organizations through a moment of genuine transformation.

The panelists:

• Arthur Soroka, Managing Director, Global Supply Chain & Operations, Accenture

• Santos Carillo, CEO and Founder, Chainsight

• Daniel Luttner, Managing Partner, NEOS by Argon & Co.

• Codye Satterwhite, Partner, Highspring (formerly Plantensive)

• Michael Ciatto, Managing Partner, Trillium Digital  

Here is what they said, and why every supply chain executive should be paying attention.

The Dirty Secret Nobody Talks About

Santos Carillo opened with something that made the room go quiet. After years of entering organizations and conducting current-state assessments, he has found the same thing over and over: the supply chain planning system is technically live, but operationally it has been bypassed. Shadow spreadsheets still run supply chains in the background. Plan adherence is low. And the foundational barriers, bad data, and broken processes are still very much alive.

This is the dirty secret of supply chain planning transformations. Companies invest millions in technology, celebrate go-live, and then watch their planners quietly revert to Excel. The system becomes shelfware. The ROI never materializes.

But Santos was optimistic, and for a specific reason. AI, done right, is starting to address the foundational issues that have made adoption so elusive. The explainability now built into modern planning systems, the ability to surface exceptions at your fingertips and show the reasoning behind every recommendation, is what he called "the death of the dashboard." For the first time, planners don't have to hunt for what matters. It comes to them via agentic AI planning systems like ketteQ.

The Bottleneck Is No Longer the Software

Daniel Luttner delivered the line that I keep coming back to weeks after ketteQuest: "The bottleneck to advancing that ball is no longer the software."

Think about what that means. For twenty years, supply chain leaders complained that their technology couldn't keep up with their ambitions. That is no longer the problem. The technology is moving faster than the organizations trying to adopt it.  

The organizations that will win in the agentic era are not the ones with the most sophisticated technology. They are the ones who rethink their operating model alongside the technology. That is a fundamentally different kind of transformation, and most organizations are not yet ready for it.

Michael Ciatto framed the shift with precision. Traditional planning systems were built around workflow and structured data models. The agentic era is built around decisions. The question leaders need to be asking is not "what workbook do I need to see?" It is "what decisions am I trying to make, and how do I surface the small percentage that actually require human judgment?"

As Michael put it, "agentic AI is a compounding effect of everything else we've been doing. This is on top, not instead."

That distinction matters enormously. Agentic AI is not a replacement for your planning infrastructure. It is the layer that makes everything you have already built significantly more powerful.

The Human Role Is Being Rewritten

Arthur Soroka reframed what it means to keep humans in the lead, and his answer was more demanding than most executives expect. The human role in an agentic planning environment is shifting from doer to thinker. From executing tasks to directing agents, evaluating outputs, and providing the judgment and context that AI cannot generate on its own.

Cody Satterwhite made this concrete. In the past, implementing a planning tool meant asking planners to do their jobs faster and with better data. That was a tool change. What organizations are asking of planners today is a job change. The planner who used to run detailed capacity analysis is now the person who reviews the two or three options the agents surface and decides which one to act on. That requires a completely different skill set, and most organizations do not yet have a training and development program to build it.

This is where Michael's work on tribal knowledge becomes critical. The institutional wisdom that lives in your most experienced planners, the unwritten rules about suppliers, customers, and market dynamics that have never made it into a data model, is exactly what agentic AI needs to perform at its best. "How do you make sure you're getting institutional and tribal knowledge data into the system when historically it didn't fit the data model?" Michael asked. That question should be on every supply chain leader's agenda right now.

Change Management Is the Work. It Always Has Been.

Every panelist, unprompted, came back to change management. Cody introduced the ADKAR framework, focused on Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement, and was direct: in twenty years of leading planning transformations, the pivotal ingredient has never been the technology. It has always been the human side of adoption.

Michael pushed the thinking further. With agentic AI, change management cannot stop at go-live. When you deploy digital labor, you need a performance framework. Trust scores. Closed-loop feedback cycles. Something closer to an HR performance management process, applied to AI. Organizations that hand off at go-live are going to struggle.

Arthur closed the loop on something that often gets lost in the technology conversation: people work with people they like and trust. The best supply chain transformations happen when consulting partners and client teams build something that feels like an internal movement rather than an outside mandate. Vision matters. Chemistry matters. And the internal transformation champion, someone on the client side who can communicate why the change is happening and what it means for the existing workforce, is often the difference between a transformation that sticks and one that doesn't.

The Message Is Clear. Are You Ready to Act?

Santos said it best at the close of the panel: "Start small, fail small, but do it continuously." Four months before ketteQuest, some of the agentic capabilities that are table stakes today simply did not exist. The pace of change is only accelerating. Waiting for the technology to stabilize is not a strategy. It is a way of falling behind.

The five experts on that stage don't agree on everything. They compete for client engagements every day. But on the things that matter most, they spoke with one voice: the technology is ready, the operating model must change, tribal knowledge is your most underutilized asset, and the time to start is now.

I left that stage more energized about the work we are doing at ketteQ than I have been in years. If you weren't in the room at ketteQuest 2026, I hope this gives you a sense of what you missed. And if you want to continue the conversation, we would love to hear from you.

ketteQuest is ketteQ's annual supply chain conference, bringing together planning leaders, technologists, and practitioners to explore the future of intelligent supply chain. The 2026 theme, Agents of Possibility, centered on the practical and strategic implications of AI agents in enterprise planning environments.

Jenny Newton is Vice President of Alliances at ketteQ, with prior experience leading alliance and partnership functions at Blue Yonder and o9 Solutions.