The Zero100 Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Is Your Agentic Rollout Creating New Cybersecurity Risks? Jul 07, 2026

Show notes

When Zero100 surveyed COOs, cybersecurity breaches emerged as the #1 business continuity risk for 2026, outranking geopolitics and tariffs. The driving force behind this anxiety? The rapid rise of agentic AI. Unlike traditional software, these autonomous systems learn and evolve through use, introducing a massive new risk landscape. This week, Senior Director, Research & Advisory Justin Gillebo sits down with VP, Research & Advisory Geraint John and Chief Research Officer Kevin O’Marah to unpack why agentic workflows require continuous operational governance, and how to balance fast-paced citizen innovation with strict guardrails before your supply chain misfires.

From Taiwan to Tariffs: How Supply Chain Leaders Are Thinking About Risk Jun 30, 2026

Show notes

Zero100 surveyed 100 supply chain leaders to find out how they're thinking about risk, resilience, and global trade. 85% say geopolitical chaos is wrecking their operations. Cybersecurity is a top-three threat. 55% say low-cost sourcing is dead. Nearly half think China will move on Taiwan by 2030. But while most companies are stuck firefighting each new crisis, a small group of leaders is doing something fundamentally different: they're treating resilience not as insurance, but as a competitive advantage. This week, Senior Director, Research & Advisory Justin Gillebo sits down with VP, Research & Advisory Geraint John and Chief Research Officer Kevin O'Marah to unpack the findings, break down the concrete plays top performers are running, and explain why resilience is no longer about defense alone.

IT vs Ops: Who Really Owns AI? Jun 23, 2026

Show notes

As coding becomes democratized, who actually owns AI implementation: operations or IT? The answer isn't either/or. This week, VPs, Research & Advisory Lauren Acoba and Kelly Coutinho, and Senior Research Analyst Jalen Thibou, tackle the difference between vibe coding prototypes and running production-scale code across geographies with proper security. They expose the hidden language barrier causing pilots to falter, reveal the specific ownership boundaries needed to scale, and explain why both roles are expanding – not competing – in ways most leaders haven't considered.

Is SynBio Manufacturing's Next Frontier? Jun 09, 2026

Show notes

Synthetic biology promises to revolutionize manufacturing, growing materials in fermentation tanks instead of relying on traditional industrial or agricultural sources. But can it scale? Zero100 Chief Content Officer Matt Davis sits down with Mathias Cousin, Managing Director at Monitor Deloitte and a SynBio veteran, to find out. Mathias reveals why manufacturing economics, not science, determines who survives, how AI is compressing design cycles from years to months, and why the biggest breakthroughs may come from replacing cows, not crude oil. With real-world examples, he shows what supply chain leaders need to understand as biological manufacturing moves from the lab to industrial reality.

What Will Humans Do When 60% of Work Is Automated? May 26, 2026

Show notes

Zero100 predicts that by 2030, 60% of supply chain’s functional activities will shift to automated or autonomous execution. But what happens to the workers in that equation? This week on the podcast, Zero100’s Matt Davis, Caroline Chumakov, and Lauren Acoba deliver the honest answer. Drawing from analyses of 413 solution providers and over a million job descriptions, they reveal how the division of labor is already shifting, explore and what work will remain distinctly human as data tasks move to automation and strategic judgment, supplier relationships, and systems thinking become the competitive advantage. With examples from BMW’s frontline upskilling programs and Fortune 100 adoption strategies, they show how winning companies bring entire workforces along this journey.

Breaking Free from AI Pilot Purgatory with PowerThreads May 19, 2026

Show notes

“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.

The Great Planning-Sourcing Standoff (And How to End It) May 06, 2026

Show notes

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.

Global Capability Centers: What to Move, Where to Invest, and How to Build Trust Apr 28, 2026

Show notes

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.

The Zero100 Mailbag: Who Owns AI's Bad Calls – and What’s Happening to Entry-Level Jobs? Apr 21, 2026

Show notes

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.

How On Built Supply Chain as Its Competitive Edge Apr 14, 2026

Show notes

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.

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