Zero100

August 28, 2026 • 5 min read In many recent conversations with supply chain and operations leaders, we’ve seen two themes dominate: planning and AI-ready data. In fact, over the last three months, 45% of our discussions with the community have been about the same baseline ambition related to both of these: Leaders want to move faster, plan continuously, use AI more intelligently, and stop allowing the monthly planning cycle to dictate what the business can see or do.

Oliver Sawbridge August 20, 2026 • 5 min read Over recent weeks, Iran’s weaponization of the Strait of Hormuz has hit home a clear message: the world’s most critical shipping chokepoints are tools of leverage, not just routes of trade. But alongside these shifting geopolitics changing the shape of trade and supply chain? Climate volatility. Facing worsening climate stress across traditional supply regions, Gulf states treat supply from abroad as a matter of national security.

Justin Gillebo August 19, 2026 • 5 min read Afew weeks ago, an operations leader at a life sciences company walked me through a planning environment where hundreds of people maintained critical parameters across the network. Each was making reasonable local decisions based on what they could see, but taken together, those decisions produced poor system-wide outcomes. The issue was not bad intent or even bad execution. It was fragmented ownership of the inputs driving the system.

Oliver Sawbridge August 14, 2026 • 6 min read This month, China’s trade surplus hit $126 billion. This is up $12 billion from a year earlier, making it the second largest surplus on record. In 2025, China’s goods-trade surplus was $1.19 trillion, which is bigger than the next ten countries put together. A surplus that size needs to go somewhere.

Jalen Thibou August 12, 2026 • 5 min read Last month at our Off the Grid conference in Dublin, we spent two days with our community discussing their top opportunities and best practices. During one session, our Chief Research Officer Kevin O’Marah interviewed the CEO of a CPG company, who shared that he uses reverse mentoring to learn from younger employees across the organization.

Geraint John July 31, 2026 • 5 min read After warnings from cyber experts about the dangers of AI agents going rogue and attacking company systems, July was the month when theoretical risk suddenly became operational reality. First, OpenAI admitted that one of its agents had escaped its testing environment and breached AI platform Hugging Face.

Caroline Chumakov July 29, 2026 • 6 min read Iwas recently working with a Zero100 member to assess automation potential across one of their priority workflows: enterprise planning connected to inventory deployment. But through the process, we discovered that for each of the tasks along this workflow, there are multiple owners. In fact, of the almost 100 unique roles in this supply chain, 69% of them have some degree of accountability for the tasks along this workflow.

July 24, 2026 • 5 min read Several sourcing leaders have been asking us the same questions lately, informed by headlines full of AI-powered transformation stories: Where are the real savings coming from? The pressure to deliver results is intense. But the scepticism we’re hearing from members lately points to the specificity that’s needed to make it a reality: what actually shows up in a P&L? Which process areas or use cases are proven to be hot for measurable impact?

Kevin O'Marah July 23, 2026 • 4 min read Last October, we published a Signal urging supply chain executives to ignore “AI bubble” talk on Wall Street and stay focused on building cross-functional process productivity gains with agentic systems. Nine months later, stock markets remain frothy as frontier labs including Anthropic and OpenAI jostle with open-source rivals like DeepSeek and Alibaba while hyperscalers, enterprise software providers, and consultants fight for your IT spend.

Justin Gillebo July 15, 2026 • 4 min read When Chamath Palihapitiya, the former Facebook executive and tech investor, launched 8090, he was making a bigger bet than “AI makes software teams more productive.” The company is built on the premise that once code generation becomes abundant, the real constraint is no longer writing software: it’s aligning people, context, and intent well enough to produce the right software on demand.