A recap of our May 13, 2026 webinar with Rick Freeman and Chris Clark
Semiconductor risk isn’t a procurement problem anymore. It’s a business continuity problem, and increasingly, a competitive one. That was the thread running through our recent webinar, where Resilinc Senior Director of Expert Services Rick Freeman sat down with Chris Clark, former Chief Supply Chain and Procurement Officer at Motorola Solutions and now Managing Partner at Todd Advisory, to talk through what’s really happening in semiconductor supply chains and what leading organizations are doing about it.
Here’s a look at the key topics and takeaways.
The shift from cost optimization to survivability
The conversation started with a fundamental question: how has supply chain leadership thinking changed?
Chris was direct: “Most companies optimized for cost and efficiency. Today the conversation is shifting to survivability, continuity, and strategic control of supply.”
Semiconductor risk, he noted, used to land squarely with procurement. Now it’s a C-suite issue. Leaders are asking “will we make the quarter?” instead of “how do we reduce unit costs?” That shift has real implications for how organizations structure their supply chain programs, their executive relationships with suppliers, and how fast they can move when disruptions hit.
Three forces creating a perfect storm
Rick walked through the macro pressures converging on semiconductor supply chains right now:
- AI demand is outpacing supply. The AI-driven supercycle is accelerating demand for high-bandwidth memory and advanced processors faster than capacity can scale. Fabs take years to ramp so you can’t solve a shortage overnight, and qualifying parts at a new fab is its own lengthy process.
- Geopolitics is fragmenting supply chains. Export controls, shifting trade alliances, and national security concerns are now primary drivers of supply chain strategy, not just risk factors to monitor. Decisions that used to be made purely on cost are now being shaped by political realities that can change within a week.
- Critical materials and energy are constrained. 70% of strategically important minerals for semiconductor production are sourced from a single country. That concentration creates systemic vulnerability. And when you map supplier networks down to tier four, five, or beyond, the same regions and the same suppliers keep appearing.
The visibility problem goes deeper than Tier 1
One of the more candid moments in the webinar came when Rick described a conversation with a C-suite executive at one of his accounts: “He said, ‘Rick, the thing that keeps me awake at night is all the stuff I can’t see. I know my tier ones. I know most of my tier twos. It’s the tier four or tier five that could mess up everything for me — from some company in a country I didn’t even know we did business with.'”
This two-way radio example illustrated this well: a relatively simple product that, when mapped all the way through its supply chain, reveals dependencies on gallium, germanium, silicon wafers, and RF semiconductors sourced from regions far removed from the final assembler.
The challenge isn’t just identifying these dependencies. It’s the speed of discovery and who you know when it matters. Rick and Chris were aligned on this: executive relationships with suppliers aren’t just good practice, they’re a competitive advantage when allocations are tight and everyone is calling at once. But those relationships only help if you know you have a problem in the first place.
Chris put it plainly: “For most organizations, tracing a disruption down through the supply chain tiers takes weeks or months. For those leveraging AI to continuously monitor and map their supply chain, it happens in minutes.” Speed of information, he argued, is the currency that gets you to the phone call first, and into the right conversation when you get there.
What the best companies do differently
Chris outlined three things he consistently sees in organizations that perform well during shortages:
- Executive supplier alignment. CEO-to-CEO and CPO-to-CEO relationships that are active before a crisis, not just during one.
- Predefined playbooks. Documented response plans that are living documents updated after every disruption, not shelved until the next one.
- Predefined allocation frameworks. Clear rules for how supply gets prioritized across product lines when there isn’t enough to go around.
On the prioritization question — how do you decide what’s critical when everything feels critical — Chris was equally direct: you can’t treat every part the same. Segmentation matters. Price isn’t always the critical factor; a sub-dollar component can be what takes down a high-revenue product line. The right lens is revenue impact, customer criticality, new product introduction risk, and recovery timeline.
He also made the case for using quieter periods well: “Never waste a good crisis. As you’re in the crisis, document and learn so when you face another one, you’re not running into the same walls.”
The Agentic Approach: Sense, Recommend, Act
The second half of the webinar focused on how agentic AI changes the response model.
Rick framed the problem simply: “In the past, we sensed things but the speed of acting on them wasn’t there.” The manual work of gathering data, building exposure analyses, running pivot tables, and identifying what to do about it consumed so much time that by the time an organization was ready to act, they were often late.
The Resilinc model breaks the agentic workflow into three stages:
Sense — real-time monitoring across a multi-tier supplier network, with relevance filtering and instant impact mapping tied to your specific supply chain.
Recommend — automated prioritization based on revenue at risk, BCP scores, single vs. multi-source status, recovery times, and other configurable factors. The system surfaces what needs attention and generates recommended actions, including scenario planning for “what if” situations.
Act — workflow launch, supplier outreach, task assignment. Some of this can be fully automated for prescribed situations; human-in-the-loop controls are available for anything requiring review or judgment.
One of Resilinc’s core agents, the Disruption Agent, puts this framework into practice, surfacing prioritized WarRoom activity, modeling revenue exposure across impacted suppliers and parts, and presenting recommended actions directly within the interface.
Chris summarized the shift: “You go from days or even weeks in the sensing and assessing phase to same-day. All the data in the background has been crunched, and now you’re looking at the real problem, getting recommendations, and taking action.”
Why the moment is now
Rick closed with a list of reasons CSCOs can’t afford to wait on AI adoption in risk management:
- Supply chain complexity has outpaced human decision-making capacity
- Disruptions are constant and compounding. The “black swan” framing may no longer apply to events that are increasingly just part of normal operations
- Visibility alone doesn’t move the needle; insight has to convert to action
- Manual execution creates delays that cost real competitive ground
Chris’s framing: “Resilience is now a competitive differentiator. It’s not just a risk management exercise.”
The companies pulling ahead aren’t waiting for the next disruption to expose the gaps in their process. They’re building the visibility, the relationships, and the agentic infrastructure now. And in a market where speed is currency, the infrastructure you build today is what determines whether you’re first in line or last.
