The Zero100 Podcast

“If one more person brings me another pilot, they're getting fired," one C-level supply chain executive told Zero100 — and they’re far from alone in their frustration. Most companies are drowning in AI projects that never scale because they’re optimizing functions in isolation while ignoring how decisions actually flow across the business. The solution? PowerThreads: end-to-end AI-enabled workflows that connect sensing, deciding, and acting across organizational silos.
This week, VPs, Research & Advisory Lauren Acoba, Jenna Fink, and Geraint John break down the five core PowerThreads driving 95% of enterprise value, share a $300M sourcing transformation that required five years of unglamorous foundation-building, and explain why optimizing one bottleneck without understanding the full system often just moves the problem downstream.

Planning and sourcing should be natural partners. So why does it so often feel like they’re working out of sync? This week, VPs, Research Kelly Coutinho and Geraint John dissect the disconnect – and, more importantly, how to bridge it. They share how leading companies are turning functional friction into competitive advantage by using AI to translate demand signals into sourcing actions, creating continuous planning rhythms that keep both teams aligned, and building cross-functional crisis protocols built to survive disruption.

Target's running a quarter of HQ operations remotely. Unilever's outsourcing demand planning to seven global hubs. Lowe's manages North American inventory from thousands of miles away. Today's Global Capability Centers have evolved far beyond back-office support – they're making the calls that drive your business. But without trust, governance, and the right talent strategy, they'll never live up to their potential. This week, Caroline Chumakov and Geraint John (VPs, Research & Advisory) and Justin Gillebo (Senior Director, Research & Advisory) break down what actually belongs in a GCC, why India isn't the only answer, and how to avoid the “us vs them" trap that hinders most implementations.

Should you fix broken planning processes before automating them, or does that just delay progress? When an AI agent makes a bad decision, who's actually accountable? And how do junior employees build expertise when AI handles the foundational work they used to learn from? This week, Cody Stack (VP, Research Analytics) sits down with Kelly Coutinho (VP, Research & Advisory) and Lauren Acoba (VP, Head of Research & Advisory) to tackle these questions and others from Zero100’s supply chain and operations community.

At 16 years old, On has a rare advantage: young enough to be agile, mature enough to scale globally. This week, Chief Supply Chain Officer Craig Jones tells Kelly Coutinho (VP, Research & Advisory) how the company’s using this window to build supply chain as a competitive advantage, not a cost center – from the development of LightSpray’s three-minute shoe uppers to AI built on obsessively clean data. His philosophy? Automate the mundane to liberate the magnificent, finish the race together, and build the company you want to be in five years, not the one you are today.