Supply chain will make more progress in the next two years than it has in the last two decades. Driverless trucks are already moving product and algorithms that lived in research papers now run in production. In this opening keynote, Lyric Founder and CEO Ganesh Ramakrishna gives a candid, unfiltered read on where supply chain is really headed and why first movers will shape what comes next. He challenges the assumptions quietly holding teams back, takes on the “AI is a bust” headlines, and lays out how Lyric is redefining the work itself, from the models people build to the decisions they own. In the Decision Era, the decisions are yours.

Every technology leader is asked to make a bet: which systems will change how the business makes decisions, and which will just add another layer to manage. At e.l.f. Beauty, supply chain planning was one of those decisions hiding in plain sight, run on spreadsheets and planner instinct. Ekta Chopra, Chief Technology and AI Officer at e.l.f. Beauty, shares why she chose Lyric Studio to make planning something her team can trust, explain, model, and act on. Hear the thinking behind the bet, what it takes to win planner confidence rather than automate around it, and how her team went from spreadsheets to a fully integrated planning system in 16 weeks.

This is the cram session everyone wishes they’d had before the jargon started flying. No background needed, no dumb questions, no gatekeeping. Dr. Mike Watson of Northwestern University trades the lectern for a seat in the front row, putting Deb Mohanty, Head of Agentic at Lyric, through the kind of Q&A that would make a freshman proud. Together they break down the foundations, dig into what the terms really mean, and highlight the genuine breakthroughs worth listening for. By the final bell, you’ll never sit quietly through an AI conversation again.

Exol runs one of the fastest-growing robotic fulfillment networks in the country, but its bid process still had a human bottleneck: days spent cleaning data and rebuilding models from scratch. The robots were moving fast. The spreadsheets were not. Teresa Viola, Senior Manager of Network Design and Supply Chain Analytics at Exol, shows how her team put agents on the problem, profiling data, classifying SKUs in seconds, and running multi-facility models in one pass to cut bids from weeks to days. Hear how the work itself changed, with agents doing the heavy lifting, analysts making the calls, and the team finally asking the questions it never had time for.

Trade promotion is one of the biggest checks a CPG company writes, and for years the team at Bob Evans Foods planned it against numbers they did not fully trust. The data sat in systems that refused to talk to each other, and most of the analysis happened after the money was already out the door. Carl Spedale, VP of Revenue Management at Bob Evans Foods, shares how his team stood up a new system in fourteen weeks, bringing the whole picture into one place and building the math to know what a promotion actually does. Hear what changed, what it took, and how the team now optimizes for revenue, market share, or margin before the money goes out instead of after.

Meet the new skillset giving supply chain organizations an AI glow up. Lyric calls them supply chain engineers: builders who can do the math and craft the story that connects it to a decision. Eighteen customer practitioners answered the call this spring in Crescendo, Lyric’s five-week program built for exactly this. Hosted by Frank Corrigan, Lyric’s Head of Product Training, the panel follows four graduates from e.l.f. Beauty, Exol, Niagara Bottling, and Red Classic Trucking through the doubt, the hard middle, the final test, and what changed when they got home. No hero carries every skill, and the best supply chain engineering happens in teams.

Most platform stories start with a big rollout. fairlife’s started with a single network model, built small on purpose. That one model went on to inform one of the largest capital decisions in company history, and the team has not slowed down since. In this fireside chat, Lyric’s Sara Hoormann sits down with Armand Frigo, Senior Director of End-to-End Planning at fairlife, to trace how one use case became many, from network modeling to rolling estimates, raw material planning, predictions, and demand and supply planning. Hear how the team decides which decision to bring into Lyric Studio next, and why each expansion starts further ahead than the one before it.

Every software conference has a customer panel. This is not that. No moderator, no script, no Lyric employee on stage, just three of Lyric’s longest-tenured customers having the conversation they would have anyway. Brian Morrow of Coca-Cola Consolidated, Melanie Sheerr of Estée Lauder, and Vijay Ganti of ACCO Brands have been building on Lyric Studio since before the documentation existed. They have watched two use cases become six and a four-day math problem become a thirty-minute one. Hear the light-bulb moments, the rough patches, and what they are pushing Lyric to build next.