Stan Aronow

Gartner recently gathered supply chain and operations executives from seven industries for a Leaders in Action event focused on leadership through the lens of automation. Let me start with an enormous "thank you" to Kathy Wengel, Peter Menziuso and Ryan Reinhardt from Johnson & Johnson for hosting our event at their Vision Global Headquarters in Florida.

I delivered the opening keynote at a summit of high-tech supply chain executives. One of the topics we discussed was people and technology trends in operations. It was striking, but not entirely surprising, that the subtopic generating the most heat in the room wasn't AI. It was everyone still grappling with how to manage return-to-office and hybrid-working expectations.

The term "forging" emerged as everyone is hammering toward their goals and away from risks. There is a more positive context in our opportunity to forge ahead as a community. As our challenges become more global and complex, the need for precompetitive cooperation increases. This is particularly true where we've all set ambitious sustainability goals, many of which require ecosystem collaboration to achieve.