2026 Agenda

• Engineering a supply chain for rate, not just milestones
• Scaling capacity while expanding the footprint
• Managing complexity across a diverse product portfolio
• Designing for reusability and faster turnaround
• De-risking single points of failure and long-lead items

As cloud and AI adoption accelerate, supply chain planning has become one of the defining competitive capabilities for the world’s largest technology organizations, demanding the ability to forecast volatile demand, secure constrained hardware and capacity, and provision globally years in advance. In this session, Joanna Kostecka shares how Microsoft approaches cloud supply chain planning at scale, and the lessons any enterprise can apply to plan with greater agility, resilience, and foresight in a high-growth, high-uncertainty environment.

Key Takeaways:

• Demand planning and forecasting when growth is exponential and historical data offers limited signal
• Managing long lead times and constrained supply (semiconductors, hardware, power, and datacenter capacity) without over- or under-provisioning
• Building optionality and resilience into the plan to absorb geopolitical, supplier, and market shocks
• Harnessing data, advanced analytics, and AI to sharpen planning accuracy and accelerate decision-making

No company can solve the complexities of modern food production, sustainability, and logistics alone. Strategic partnerships, managed actively and collaboratively rather than transactionally, are key to building resilience, agility, and unlocking mutual value and efficiencies across the supply chain.

• Intel’s supply chain is a strategic enabler, powered by advanced manufacturing, digital infrastructure, and AI-driven insights, supporting the company from design through delivery at global scale.
• Our globally distributed manufacturing footprint provides unmatched production flexibility, advanced packaging capabilities, and built-in business continuity.
• To support this scale, Intel embeds AI-enabled risk management holistically across structure, process, and culture, ensuring resilience at every level of the organization, from the boardroom to supplier operations.
• This foundation is reinforced by a comprehensive business continuity program, operationalized across sourcing, inventory, and supplier management, and guided by five key principles.
• Operationally, Intel’s Supply Chain Command Center—enhanced by AI-driven analytics—along with the Corporate Emergency Operations Center and cross-functional crisis teams, enables proactive planning, rapid response, and direct engagement with supplier executives during disruptions.
• Finally, a robust AI-informed risk assessment framework evaluates supplier concentration, geographic exposure, regulatory risk, financial health, and capacity utilization, driving toward an optimal state of supplier and geographic diversification.
• Together, these capabilities position Intel’s supply chain as a competitive advantage, enabling resilience, agility, and continuity in an increasingly complex global environment.

• How connected platforms, secure networking, IoT and data frameworks enable real-time visibility and collaboration across the supply chain
• Using digital infrastructure, cloud solutions, and AI-driven insights to support adaptive planning, risk detection, and decision orchestration
• Ensuring cybersecurity and reliability in distributed supply networks — especially as digital transformation accelerates
• Starbucks’ use of digital tools for route optimization, load consolidation, and modeling low-carbon delivery flows
• Aligning tech-driven supply chain capabilities with brand value and customer expectations

• Designing for supply chain risk from day one: How to embed risk considerations into the product development process before sourcing is fixed — and why the window to act closes faster than most organizations realize
• Mapping sub-tier dependency: Techniques for identifying components and materials sourced from countries of concern at the second and third tier of the supply chain, where visibility typically breaks down and where exposure is often highest
• The risk buy-down funnel: A structured, stage-gated process for evaluating, prioritizing, and systematically eliminating the highest-impact risk nodes — demonstrated across the full arc from initial design through final deployment
• Regulatory landscape and compliance in practice: Managing the expanding body of U.S. Government requirements — including NDAA provisions and executive orders targeting foreign adversary technology — and their cascading impact not only on A&D primes but on commercial sub-tier suppliers throughout the value chain
• Removing countries of concern suppliers and materials dependency: A practical roadmap for reducing and ultimately eliminating single-source exposure to countries of concern origin components and materials — not as a theoretical goal, but as an operational program that can be stood up and executed within existing organizational structures.
  • Identifying which components carry the highest strategic and regulatory risk and sequencing substitution based on criticality, replaceability, and lead time realities
  • Building the internal business case for re-sourcing when short-term cost and schedule implications create resistance — and how to frame the risk trade-off in terms leadership and government customers will act on

• Identify your organization’s 3–5 critical supply chain roles and assess capability gaps
• Embed succession planning into business processes with clear owners and timelines
• Deploy daily leadership practices (coaching huddles, role rotations, feedback rhythms) to accelerate development
• Measure progress with simple, actionable metrics tied to retention and readiness
• Surface lessons from failures and iterate governance to ensure sustained talent outcomes