Insights from Allan Dow, EVP & General Manager, Aptean Supply Chain
The supply chain industry has no shortage of AI hype. But according to Allan Dow, EVP and General Manager of Aptean Supply Chain, the companies winning in today’s volatile environment aren’t just layering AI on top of old processes — they’re fundamentally rethinking how their operations work.
With 26 years in the supply chain technology space, Dow has watched the industry evolve from on-shore manufacturing and shouted orders across a factory floor to global, just-in-time networks spanning multiple continents. He sat down following his keynote appearance at Manifest 2026 in Las Vegas to share what’s really driving change — and what organizations are still getting wrong.
The World Moved Faster. Supply Chains Didn’t.
“Twenty-five years ago, if you needed to expedite something, you got out of your chair, walked out back, and yelled at the guy on the production floor,” Dow said with a laugh. “Those blue ones you need shipped tonight? They’re probably being made in Asia and won’t arrive for six weeks.”
The shift from local to global, from slow to “just-in-time,” raised the stakes for every disruption. Bridges get knocked out, ports close, new tariffs arrive with breakneck speeds but the pace of change hasn’t just accelerated; the cost of falling behind has multiplied.
Dow’s team at Aptean, through their Logility platform, helps over 500 customers across consumer goods, food and beverage, automotive, and specialty chemicals navigate this complexity. Their approach spans supply chain planning, warehouse management, transportation, factory scheduling, and an operations command center that ties all of it together in real time.
The Incrementalism Trap
Here’s where Dow draws a sharp distinction. Most organizations, when exploring AI, ask a simple question: “How can I do what I do today a little bit faster?” That, he argues, is exactly the wrong question.
“It’s like before Henry Ford,” he said. “If you asked factory workers how to build cars more efficiently, they’d say, ‘Automate the hammer, make the wrench spin faster.’ But Ford didn’t do that. He rethought the entire system.”
AI, in Dow’s view, is most powerful not when it speeds up existing workflows but when it eliminates the need for them altogether. His team builds agentic AI solutions that go beyond analyzing data by acting on data. From narrowing a product recall from an entire region down to a single state, to enabling a customer to configure and schedule a water heater installation at 10 p.m. without a single human rep involved, the goal is autonomous, intelligent action.
Democratizing the Supply Chain
Perhaps the most compelling theme Dow raised was what he calls “democratizing the supply chain.” Historically, supply chains operated in isolated silos focused on planning teams, purchasing teams, and factory floors that rarely spoke the same language. Leaders depended on layers of experts to translate data into decisions, often arriving at answers that bore little resemblance to the original question.
Aptean’s operations command center changes that dynamic by putting real-time insights directly in the hands of decision-makers. When a customer needs an order by Tuesday, everyone from the factory and customer service teams to the supply planners, and so forth, works in the same platform, and makes adjustments collaboratively instead of passing messages through a mobile phone or email.
“We’re helping them build a more efficient end-to-end supply chain,” Dow said. “Not by automating the old way of doing things; but by creating a new one.”
—-
Allan Dow is EVP and General Manager of Aptean Supply Chain, and former CEO of Logility. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
