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.