We hit the floor at Manifest and asked seven industry experts the same two questions: What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen at the show? And where is the supply chain headed next? Here’s what they told us.
There’s a version of Manifest recaps where everyone just talks about AI. And yes, AI came up — a lot. But what we actually heard walking the floor this year was more nuanced, more grounded, and honestly, more interesting than the usual hype cycle.
We pulled aside leaders from Cycle Labs, Arvist, EasyPost, Locus Robotics, enVista, Vaibe and Shipium — people who live and breathe supply chain operations — and asked them what stood out. A few clear themes emerged.
The Coolest Thing Wasn’t a Product
Ask a room full of supply chain professionals what the coolest thing on the show floor is and you’d expect answers like “that autonomous robot” or “this new WMS.” Josh Owen, Founder, President and Executive Chairman of Cycle Labs, gave a different answer: the coolest thing he saw was a “mindset shift.”
For 20 years, he explained, the operating principle in the supply chain was simple — avoid change unless you absolutely have to. That’s changing. The AI conversation has lit something up in this industry. People are hungry to innovate in a way Josh says he hasn’t seen in his two decades in the space.
His prediction for what comes next is equally interesting: vendor diversification. For a long time, customers were locked into a handful of large incumbents. There wasn’t really another option. Now there is. Smaller, newer players are entering the market with competitive solutions, and customers are starting to exercise that choice. The incumbents still matter — but they’re no longer the only answer.
The message he wanted to leave people with: stop treating change as something that happens to you, and start treating it as something you pursue.
Real Operators, Real Use Cases
Nilay Parikh, Founder and CEO of Arvist, had a simple answer for what impressed him most: seeing actual supply chain operators on stage showing how they use AI in production — not vendors demoing features, but companies like C.H. Robinson and others showing real-world results across warehousing, freight, and brokerage.
That matters more than it sounds. It’s the difference between “here’s what this technology can do” and “here’s what it did for us last quarter.”
His bigger-picture point was about how much runway is still ahead. Less than 5–7% of warehouses are meaningfully automated or digitized today. That’s not a warning — it’s an opportunity. The show floor expanding year over year is its own evidence: the solutions are here, and adoption is just getting started. The next one to three years, in his view, will be defining for how fast this industry can close the gap with other sectors that have already gone through their technology transformation.
Robots Are Having Their Moment
Sam Hancock, COO at EasyPost, has been coming to Manifest for years. What struck him this time: robotics is showing up in a way it hasn’t before. The integration of physical automation with AI-driven software — tracking a product from rack to truck in real time — is moving from concept to reality.
More broadly, he pointed to how much automation has grown since the early days of the show. Less human error. Better warehouse visibility. Fewer situations where you have to “throw bodies at a problem” to fix it.
For his future prediction, Sam went a direction nobody else did: carrier consolidation. While everyone’s talking about AI, he’s watching the carrier landscape and expecting to see regional players combine over the next two years to build out nationwide networks capable of competing with the FedExes and UPSes of the world. More options, more competition — he sees that as a win for shippers and the industry alike.
The tailwind underneath all of it, in his view, is e-commerce. It keeps growing, the addressable market for logistics keeps growing with it, and the need for better technology, better infrastructure, and better people keeps growing too.
Flexibility Is Now the Product
Steve Simmerman, Vice President, Global Alliance at Locus Robotics, noticed something interesting about what’s changed in customer conversations. Customers don’t want to bolt things to the floor anymore. Conveyors, fixed infrastructure, systems that can’t adapt — those are becoming deal-breakers, not checkboxes.
The solutions that got the most attention on the floor, in his observation, weren’t necessarily the flashiest — they were the ones designed to flex. Supply chains face dynamic, constantly shifting conditions. Your technology stack needs to be reactive by design, not just capable in a stable environment.
On AI specifically: he called it table stakes. It’s on every vendor’s website, it’s in every pitch, it’s assumed. The companies that will differentiate themselves are the ones that use it to build that reactive flexibility — not just bolt it on as a feature.
AI Is the Layer, Not the Solution
Nate Rosier, COO at enVista, made a comment that stuck with us. When he talked about what made the autonomous robots on the show floor impressive, he wasn’t really talking about the robots — he was talking about the software underneath them. AI is the connective layer that makes all these cool physical things actually work together.
His point about the future of warehouse management was practical and worth listening to. Warehouses are genuinely more complex than they were five or ten years ago — more SKUs, more channels, more returns, more variability. No single system handles all of that. The winning move isn’t finding the perfect all-in-one platform; it’s building a flexible technology roadmap and adding capabilities over time as your operation evolves. That kind of flexibility is relatively new. He thinks it’ll become standard.
His parting advice: don’t try to figure this out alone. COVID proved the value of collaboration in the supply chain. There’s a lot of hard-won experience in this industry — learn from it, then apply your own creativity on top. The best supply chains in the world aren’t just executing the basics. They’re thinking differently.
The Show Floor Reminder: People Still Matter
Tiago Sottomayor, CTO at Vaibe, came in expecting Manifest to feel like NRF: wall-to-wall AI conversations. What he found instead surprised him. The show had a stronger focus on “people’ including warehouse workers, operators, the humans doing the job every day.
That might sound like a step backward. It wasn’t. It was a sign of maturity. The industry is starting to reckon with a real question: how do you deploy all this new technology without leaving your workforce behind? The answer, as Sottomayor sees it, is balance — AI and automation working with people, not instead of them. Add cobots and AMRs into that mix, and you’ve got a model for how the modern warehouse actually operates.
It’s a grounding reminder worth carrying out of the show: the goal isn’t automation for its own sake. The goal is building operations where people and technology make each other more effective.
Predict or React — and Now You Can Do Both
Jason Murray, Co-Founder and CEO at Shipium, put the whole AI conversation in a frame that tied everything together. The fundamental challenge in supply chain, he said, is a choice: you’re either really good at predicting what will happen, or you’re really fast at reacting when it does.
For most of the supply chain’s history, the reaction loop involved humans: someone notices a behavior change, pulls data, runs analysis, and comes to a conclusion. By the time that process finishes, the moment is often gone. Autonomous agents operating in minutes — not days — change that equation fundamentally.
He’s also watching the autonomous vehicle and trucking space closely. Transportation cost structures have been largely stagnant for a century. Self-driving trucks, in his view, represent one of the few real opportunities to change that at a foundational level.
His overall take was measured but confident: AI is going to be disruptive across the board — analysis, insights, automation, scheduling, routing — and the companies that use it to make smarter, faster, more cost-effective decisions are the ones that will pull ahead. The disruption isn’t coming. It’s here. The question is who moves first.
What We Took Away:
Seven conversations, a lot of ground covered, and a few things that kept surfacing regardless of who we were talking to:
- The mindset is shifting. Supply chain has been a change-resistant industry for a long time. That’s loosening. People are looking for new approaches, not just defending the old ones.
- AI is infrastructure now. It’s not a differentiator — it’s the baseline. The conversation has moved from “should we use AI?” to “how do we use it well?”
- People still matter. For all the automation on the show floor, the most interesting operators are thinking carefully about how technology and humans work together — not one replacing the other.
- Flexibility wins. Rigid systems built for yesterday’s operating conditions are losing ground to adaptive ones built for whatever comes next.
- There’s a lot of runway. With less than 7% of warehouses meaningfully automated, the industry is still early. The next few years will be formative.
Manifest 2026 made one thing clear: the people in this space are no longer waiting to see where things land. They’re building — and moving fast.
We’ll be back on the floor next year. If you want to be part of the conversation, reach out.
