Every January, supply chain executives make the same predictions. AI will transform everything. Automation will solve the labor shortage. Real-time visibility will finally arrive. And by December of that same year, most of those predictions turn out to be either wildly optimistic or completely off-target.
But in our latest Confessions of Supply Chain Executives episode, Amir Khoshniyati, Vice President at Wiliot, makes a compelling case that 2026 is genuinely different. Not because the technology has changed, but because the pain has finally become impossible to ignore.
The Inflection Point Nobody Expected
Here’s the uncomfortable truth most supply chain forecasts miss: the driver of technology adoption isn’t the technology itself. It’s the ability to quantify pain.
“The biggest theme going into this year is that the embracing of technology is at a velocity it’s never been at in prior years,” Khoshniyati explains. Previous years were about evaluation — running pilots, waiting, watching them die off, then cycling through stakeholder approvals again. What’s different in 2026 is that executives have developed both the urgency and the analytical framework to move from evaluation to action.
The forcing function? Quantifiable loss. Consider a simple example: a pallet of perishables sitting on a trailer with unexpected dwell time. Every minute of delay is one second closer to spoilage. And spoilage is a number that finance, operations, and merchandising can all agree on. When pain can be attached to a dollar figure, budgets follow.
The Five Trends That Are Actually Gaining Traction
Khoshniyati walks through five interconnected forces reshaping supply chain operations and is refreshingly candid about where each one actually stands in terms of real-world adoption.
Physical AI: More Than a Buzzword
Physical AI is the trend that dominated the NRF show floor and is now showing up in nearly every supply chain conversation. Khoshniyati’s definition cuts through the hype: it’s the process of assigning a digital identity to every physical asset, ingesting that data, and then deploying AI to run meaningful insights on what’s coming in. The concept isn’t new. For example, barcodes and RFID have been tagging physical items for decades, but the addition of sensing data (temperature, humidity, light exposure, tamper detection) creates a fundamentally different information layer. The AI component is what finally makes sense of the raw data flood.
The candid take on adoption is that is still early, however. The infrastructure exists. The tagging capability exists. What’s being built right now is the intelligence layer to make it all actionable at scale.
Real-Time Item Location: The Nice-to-Have That Became a Must-Have
Walmart’s major BLE initiative with Wiliot has put real-time item visibility on every retailer’s agenda, but the “which technology do I bet on” debate is creating paralysis in boardrooms. Khoshniyati’s answer is one of the most clarifying moments of the episode: RFID and ambient IoT aren’t competitors, they’re complements. RFID wins at high-speed, choke-point scenarios, like a conveyor belt processing 200 items per minute through a dock door. Ambient IoT wins everywhere else: in-transit visibility, temperature monitoring across nodes, use cases where RFID infrastructure costs make the ROI math impossible.
The practical starting question for any executive is therefore not “which technology,” but “where did our last RFID implementation break down, and what were the limiting factors?”
AI Meets Physical Data: The X-Ray Vision Moment
Khoshniyati’s description of what becomes possible when real-time data and modern AI capabilities combine is the most vivid framing I’ve heard on this topic. He calls it X-ray vision. You will know if your salmon tastes bitter. You will know whether it baked in the heat on the wrong side of a trailer crossing the desert, or whether the restaurant refroze it four times before serving it.
This honest caveat is important, though. AI is only as good as the data being ingested, and right now the supply chain is full of what Khoshniyati calls “brownout spots” — good visibility at the processor, lost visibility until the DC, a glimpse as it leaves for the store, then darkness until it hits a plate. Closing those brownout spots is the foundational work that unlocks everything else. The fully autonomous, predictive supply chain is a real idea, but it’s contingent on getting the data inputs right first.
Grocery E-Commerce: The Profitability Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight
With U.S. grocery e-commerce penetration approaching 19%, the industry is hitting a threshold that is exposing every underlying supply chain weakness simultaneously. Khoshniyati is direct here too: grocery e-commerce is harder than traditional e-commerce, full stop. The reason is time. Every perishable order has a biological deadline, and that deadline doesn’t pause for logistics hiccups, 3PL failures, or a DoorDash driver’s trunk temperature.
The profitability implications are also severe. A pallet of items sitting out for more than 15 minutes at the wrong temperature isn’t just a service failure. It’s also a written-off asset. The retailers winning in grocery e-commerce will be the ones who extend visibility ownership all the way through the last mile, including eventually into the delivery vehicle itself.
FSMA and Digital Product Passports: Compliance as Competitive Advantage
The Food Safety Modernization Act deadlines are approaching, and the Digital Product Passport mandate is already reshaping European operations starting with high-value categories like batteries before moving into perishables and healthcare. Khoshniyati’s framing of this regulatory pressure reframes the entire conversation. Early adopters of compliance infrastructure don’t just avoid penalties; they accumulate a data advantage their competitors cannot close quickly.
The industries that tend to fear regulation most are often the ones best positioned to benefit from it. If you plant the flag, you get the head start. While others are catching up to compliance, you’re already on the next innovation charter.
The Three ROI Metrics That Actually Matter
When supply chain executives ask Khoshniyati how to build a business case for these technologies, he cuts through the ambiguity and points to three specific metrics: shrink (inventory lost to unknown causes within the supply chain), perishable spoilage (items written off because they couldn’t be sold), and workflow inefficiency (the quantifiable cost of every manual intervention, double-scan, and rework event on the warehouse floor).
That last one catches most executives off guard. The cost of asking someone to scan the same item twice or to manually intervene because a scanner missed a line-of-sight is almost never tracked, yet it compounds into significant dollars across a facility operating at scale. Technology makes it measurable for the first time.
The Confession: Adoption Is the Only Real Risk
When pressed for the uncomfortable truth that retailers don’t want to hear, Khoshniyati lands on a word that’s easy to underestimate: adoption.
Not technology failure. Not integration complexity. Adoption. The single biggest risk in any digital transformation initiative is that the value goes unrealized because the organization around the technology never fully committed to using it. Khoshniyati’s prescription is specific. Surround the implementation with the right internal and external stakeholders from day one, not after the first stumble. The executives who succeed aren’t the ones who chose the best technology. They’re the ones who built the best tiger team.
The five trends Khoshniyati maps aren’t five separate decisions. They’re five interlocking pieces of a single foundation. The question for 2026 isn’t which trend to prioritize. It’s which pain point, when quantified honestly, tells you where to start building.
Watch or listen to the full Confessions of Supply Chain Executives episode with Amir Khoshniyati of Wiliot to hear the complete conversation on Physical AI, real-time visibility, and what it actually takes to build a supply chain for the next decade wherever you get your podcasts:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Soundcloud | Amazon Music | YouTube
Be careful out there,
– Chris, Anne, and the Omni Talk team
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Omni Talk® is the retail blog for retailers, written by retailers. Chris Walton and Anne Mezzenga founded Omni Talk® in 2017 and have quickly turned it into one of the fastest growing blogs in retail.