It’s that time of year when Kelly Barner and I write our year-end supply chain and supply market research resources review. Kelly’s section, “2025: Supply Chain Year in Review” is presented first then my section on resource trends follows.
2025: Supply Chain Year in Review
2025 was a year of disruptions in procurement and supply chain. Many of those disruptions stemmed from Federal policies and enforcement priorities and already look like they will have the potential to spark systemic change that lasts long into the future.
This, of course, has required supply chain professionals to navigate some very delicate conversations, ones that brought them closer to discussing politics in the workplace than ever before. Although the trends highlighted below are largely technical in nature, it seems appropriate to acknowledge the advancements in ‘soft skills’ that were required this year: like carefully wording statements and listening with great care.
A Tariff Reality Check
We might as well start by getting the obvious out of the way. The Trump Administration’s tariffs not only caused a fair amount of heartburn in 2025, but they also led to changes in sourcing strategy and altered import timing.
While no one can be surprised that trade was a major cornerstone of diplomacy in Trump’s second term, the fact that all countries were affected by their new approach to tariffs left companies few ways to achieve stability once their supply chains left U.S. shores. This was not just a way of containing China’s influence, it was a complete reshuffling of trade relationships.
Some tariffs sought to better align economic activity and diplomatic relationships, while others (like those focused on steel) had more of a national security bent to them.
Just as we’ve all adjusted to the role of tariffs in our business decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule any day about the legality of those tariffs, especially the ones established under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Whether they rule for or against, supply chains around the world will once again have to reposition in response.
Reshoring Beyond the Factory Floor
As in past years, reshoring was more a matter of talk than action in 2025, but with a few notable exceptions. Companies like GE Appliances figured out that they couldn’t just handle their own production domestically; they also had to find suppliers in the United States (potentially multiple tiers into the supply chain) to ensure they could reliably get what their needed to keep their operations running.
While the goal is to fuel a manufacturing renaissance, most of the production facilities being built or retrofitted in the U.S. have more automation than they would have in the past. This means less jobs created per square foot. On the other hand, the jobs that are created are likely to have an automation component to them, hopefully attracting a new generation of tech-first workers into manufacturing.
Autonomous Trucking Gains Ground
Driverless trucks made notable progress this year, even if the best examples – such as Kodiak – are predominantly operating in closed, off-road scenarios such as in the Permian Basin.
Each company in the driverless truck space has approached the market in their own way, with some providing the whole vehicle and others retrofitting existing equipment with sensors and software.
This progress has certainly been led by a desire to bring automation into trucking, but the Federal government has had a role here as well – one that spans multiple administrations.
There is an ongoing debate about whether there is a truck driver shortage or just a shortage of good truck drivers. The two may sound similar, but they are very different, and the solutions vary greatly. If there is truly a truck driver shortage, then automation is a solution, as is incentivizing drivers to enter the profession from another line of work or another country. With both of those solutions, public safety cannot be compromised… period.
A series of high-profile accidents caused by truck drivers has led to increased scrutiny, not just of current driver qualifications, but of how those qualifications are met and enforced. Thanks to the fact that this must be achieved through Federal and state level coordination, this trending topic is likely to spark discussion well into 2026 and beyond.
Bananas and Collective Bargaining
Labor unions also swung their weight around in 2025, affecting multiple parts of the supply chain in the process.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters represents most UPS drivers and warehouse workers. Every time the company makes a change to remain profitable in a competitive space, they weigh in. It is hard to argue that workers shouldn’t be paid fairly or that they shouldn’t earn competitive benefits from a company that makes about $100 Billion annually, unless of course you consider how that worked out for Yellow Freight, a Teamsters shop that was reduced to little more than real estate in 2023.
We also saw the resolution to port-related organized labor activity that began in October of 2024. The East and Gulf Coast dockworkers went on strike. Americans were warned that there would be significant consumer shortages, setting off a panic about the availability of bananas, and then… three days later it was over. Most of the anticipatory bananas weren’t even ripe enough to make banana bread with yet.
The major issue in this negotiation was automation, defined in the strictest sense by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). Even having something equivalent to an automated garage door opener was too much to be tolerated. When the contract was finalized in January of 2025, we learned that the union and the ports managed to agree on ‘semi-automation’ where devices and technology could help workers but not replace them. I’m sure a lot of corporate knowledge workers would love to get the same deal in the face of rising AI use.
We already know some of these stories will continue into 2026, and how supply chain teams prepare to face them will separate the leaders from the followers. It is no longer enough to have good backup plans; companies need to be able to modify their strategies and tactics in near real time – perhaps with the help of AI – if they want to turn as many unexpected events into opportunities as possible.
Supply Market Research Resource Trends
Even though developments in agentic AI capabilities seemed to have dominated supply-related research resource announcements in 2025 (many of these have been covered throughout the year via the Cottrill Research blog), this review will focus on three trending areas that are not in the spotlight but will likely have equally lasting impact in the near future and possibly years to come.
1) Geopolitical Influences and Emergence of Sovereign AI
Risk Categories Increase – Recent increased complexities around globalization, such as building political tensions due to trade instability, have resulted in a growing variety of geopolitical risk indicators to be observed and monitored. In response, we saw providers of supplier risk management solutions hone and improve their offerings in addition to procurement intelligence providers launching new supplier risk solutions. Examples:
- Sphera launched Supplier 360 Intelligence, which provides risk summaries by consolidating 400 supplier, country, and industry-level risk indicators.
- Resilinc launched its Agentic AI platform where agents continuously monitor millions of data sources for geopolitical, regulatory, cyber, and environmental threats.
- Orchestration platform provider, Zip, added a solution for supplier risk management to its platform for organizations to streamline supplier risk assessments, financial verification and regulatory compliance.
- Spend analytics provider, SpendHQ released a supplier risk management tool that monitors financial, geopolitical and operational factors across global supply chains.
Tariff Monitoring Solutions – In response to President Trump’s actions concerning reciprocal tariffs with trading partners (as Kelly discussed above), new tariff monitoring and intelligence solutions were introduced throughout 2025. (It’s interesting to note that 82 percent of respondents in a recent McKinsey survey said their supply chains are affected by new tariffs.) Examples:
- Exiger launched its tariff solution, which forecasts tariff impacts and provides granularity into which routes, suppliers, and components trigger higher tariffs. Users can map their tariff exposure down to the raw material and part-level.
- Project44 makes available a page with up-to-date overviews of tariff changes and later announced the launch of Tariff Analytics, which provides tariff visibility by linking customer product catalogs to real-time rates across all U.S. tariff types.
- Sourcemap launched its n-Tier Tariff Mapping Solution which provides verified chain of custody data for raw materials and sub-components.
- Many open access resources were introduced that track tariff activity on a continuous basis. Supply Chain Dive is tracking where each threatened or realized tariff currently stands, ReedSmith tracks tariff activity with commentary, and the Brookings Tariff Tracker provides easy-to-access information on new tariffs implemented by the U.S. and by other countries in retaliation.
Geopolitical Influences: Looking Forward – Sovereign AI refers to “a nation’s capabilities to produce artificial intelligence using its own infrastructure, data, workforce and business networks.” This era we are entering is where a country’s sovereignty “now extends to the ability to generate and control one’s own intelligence.” The European Parliament recognized that Europe is too heavily reliant on American and other foreign technologies and several countries are now developing their own sovereign AI models. China is a leader in investing in AI development and is at the forefront. According to a study by JP Morgan more countries and localities, “are asserting control over AI infrastructure, talent, and governance frameworks—exporting rules as well as building walls, and forcing firms to navigate a more divided AI ecosystem… Energy and hardware are the new chokepoints. Semiconductors, critical minerals, and electricity capacity define who can scale AI, and who risks falling behind.” It will be interesting to see if providers launch intelligence solutions that track, consolidate, and analyze these (and other) areas of sovereign AI activity of individual countries.
2) Changes in the Supplier Discovery Landscape
In 2025, two acquisitions of key providers have changed the supplier discovery landscape and signals just how important this part of the sourcing process is. In the fall, Beroe acquired supplier discovery provider, Forestreet and Coupa signed a definitive agreement to acquire Scoutbee, where it will integrate Scoutbee’s supplier network and dataset with the Coupa platform. Another example of supplier discovery being part of a larger global intelligence offering is S&P Global’s announcement that it is partnering to embed IBM’s watsonx Orchestrate agentic framework into its suite of offerings, starting with supply chain management to provide greater visibility into its supply chain and vendor selection tools.
Additional interesting activity to note came from Supplier.io who unveiled its enhanced platform for discovering small businesses. The platform’s supplier profiles will double in growth including an additional 250,000 small businesses in Mexico to support nearshoring demand and over 5 million new U.S. small suppliers. The challenge for supplier discovery solutions has always been how to identify highly specialized/niche products and services. Supplier.io’s recent focus on smaller, local suppliers is distinguishing.
B2B niche/vertical marketplaces maintain their appeal by effectively addressing the specific, specialized challenges unique to different industries or niches. For example, Farmers Business Network’s (FBN) expanded its portfolio to include more private label and third-party crop protection products, Canadian growth, a new seed platform for third-party seed offers, and increased livestock coverage.
Supplier Discovery: Looking Forward – In 2026, look for supplier discovery solutions to increasingly incorporate agentic AI functionality and for those (standalone or not) that have capabilities to identify and address gaps in niche, specialized industries and markets.
3) AI Copyright Awareness and Licensing for News and Research Publications
2025 was the year of AI copyright infringement cases. In September, a U.S. District Judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and authors who claimed roughly 465,000 books “had been illegally pirated to train chatbots.” As of December 12, two additional lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft were being combined with other copyright infringement lawsuits already filed by The New York Times, the Center for Investigative Reporting, Ziff Davis, and others. Also, Perplexity was sued by Dow Jones and the New York Post for copyright infringement (CRJ reports). (Here is the TOW Center tracker to get a comprehensive view of all the cases)
For organization buyers of news/research services and professionals who actively use news outlets for their research needs these developments are of concern. For example, when researching and using any type of an AI generated search tool (like ChatGPT or Google’s Deep Think) it is difficult to determine which sources are, and are not, available for inclusion and/or have been legally licensed.
AI and News/Research Outlets: Looking Forward – For procurement, buying these services will present major challenges. Look for both media organizations and AI companies to develop and consider alternative means to solve copyright/licensing disputes. The CJR reports roughly twenty media groups have reached licensing agreements with OpenAI and AI companies are exploring different compensation approaches. Several news outlets will be launch partners in the forthcoming Microsoft Publisher Content Marketplace and a new clearinghouse where publishers can set payment terms and attribution rules, named Really Simple Licensing, is forthcoming.
Image by Vilius Kukanauskas from Pixabay
