The wake-up call always comes too late
The supply chain wake-up call always comes too late. A shipment gets detained at customs. A critical supplier vanishes overnight. Regulators crack down on forced labor violations. And suddenly, the investments you postponed for years become urgent—but the damage is already done.
Ted Colbert, former CEO of Boeing Defense, Space, and Security, has seen this pattern play out many times. When asked during a recent Resilinc webinar what drives executives to invest in compliance and risk management transformation, he responded:
“Sometimes it takes a trigger… but that’s often too late.”
Colbert isn’t speaking in hypotheticals—he led one of the world’s most complex, globally scrutinized supply chains through the pandemic and beyond.
But his point lands far beyond aerospace. Across industries, companies continue to treat supply chain modernization as a reactive function—something to address after a crisis. By then, it’s not a transformation strategy. It’s damage control.
And Colbert’s message is clear: The winners are the ones who invest before the storm hits.
Why do companies wait so long to invest in compliance and risk management technology?
Supply chain risk management (SCRM) is no longer a nice-to-have. Labor shortages, climate volatility, export controls, and regulatory scrutiny are constant. And yet, too many executive teams delay investment until the organization is already bleeding.
Colbert reflects on his own dual vantage points—as CIO pushing for digital investment, and later, as CEO dealing with the fallout of underinvestment:
“As a CIO, I tried to influence the company to invest in digital. Then as a CEO, I realized I hadn’t pushed hard enough in some areas. I had to live with that.”
It’s a pattern repeated across industries. The demand to justify every dollar with an ROI leads to paralysis—until a global event (like COVID or UFLPA enforcement) makes the cost of not acting painfully clear.
The cost of inaction
Let’s be blunt: the consequences of inaction are measurable—and massive.
- Shipments delayed or denied due to forced labor violations
- Lost revenue from parts you didn’t know were at risk
- Weeks spent tracing supply chain impact manually
McKinsey estimates that companies lose up to 40% of EBITDA over a decade from unmitigated supply chain disruption. That’s not theoretical. That’s a business case hiding in plain sight.
And as Colbert noted, the bottleneck is rarely technology itself, it’s cross-functional leadership alignment:
“The moment you silo any one of these problems—supply chain, cybersecurity, compliance—you’ve failed. It has to be a business conversation. It’s not about IT. It’s about value delivery to customers.”
Proactive leaders build before disruption hits
So, what does it look like when companies act early?
It starts with recognizing that digitization and AI are no longer “future-state” initiatives—they are now solutions. Especially as modern agentic AI supply chain risk platforms like Resilinc’s begin transforming how supply chains sense, recommend, and respond to risk.
As Resilinc CMO Gopkiran Rao put it,
“Traditional approaches burn resources on detection and coordination instead of resolution. Agentic AI shifts that dynamic—guiding teams from insight to action, autonomously.”
Rather than sifting through dashboards or emailing suppliers after the fact, Agentic AI enables organizations to:
- Automatically detect disruptions in real time
- Assess supplier, part, and revenue impact
- Recommend and even initiate mitigation workflows
- Track and adapt to regulatory change (UFLPA, CHIPS Act, and more)
In other words, the manual lag time disappears—and you move at the pace of disruption.
Build the coalition before the crisis
Colbert is adamant: proactive resilience isn’t a solo act.
It requires coalition-building across the C-suite, aligned around a shared understanding of business value.
“This is a partnership between the supply chain leader, the CFO, and the CEO. You have to make the tradeoffs. Yes, you want to put every dollar into products—but sometimes you need to invest in the foundation that keeps the products moving.”
Agentic AI gives this coalition a shared platform: a single source of truth that moves risk intelligence from siloed systems to boardroom strategy.
Don’t wait for the next disruption
The truth is, most companies will wait. They’ll act after a shipment is detained, a supplier goes dark, or a contract is lost. By then, the costs are already sunk.
But for companies ready to lead—not just react—agentic AI supply chain risk platforms offer a different path forward: faster decisions, fewer disruptions, and a competitive edge rooted in resilience.
Colbert put it best:
“The tools we have today let us make decisions in a very different way—with more data, more diversity, and at a speed we couldn’t reach before.”
Want to hear the full conversation? View the on-demand webinar now.
