IN Brief:
- RELEX says 86% of surveyed supply chain leaders have already been affected by tariffs or trade policy changes.
- Companies are diverging on stockholding, pricing, sourcing, and promotional responses rather than following one playbook.
- The findings point to a planning environment where AI and scenario modelling are moving closer to core operations.
A new RELEX survey suggests tariffs and wider economic pressure are no longer being treated as an external nuisance to be managed at the edges of planning. They are now shaping core decisions on pricing, sourcing, inventory, and promotion across the supply chain.
According to the company’s preview of its third annual State of the Supply Chain 2026 report, 86% of supply chain leaders said trade policy changes or tariffs had already affected operations. The study was based on a January 2026 survey of 514 leaders across retail, manufacturing, wholesale, and supply chain roles, conducted by Researchscape.
The most useful part of the findings is not simply the scale of disruption, but the lack of consensus in how companies are responding. Some are increasing buffers to guard against supply shocks and policy swings. Others are keeping stock leaner and using pricing, sourcing shifts, or assortment changes to protect margin. That split suggests volatility is no longer producing a standard resilience playbook. The trade-offs are becoming more company-specific, tied to category economics, supplier geography, and how quickly planners can model scenario changes.
That helps explain why AI is moving from a fashionable label to a more operational one. When tariff exposure changes landed cost assumptions, supplier choices, and promotional decisions at the same time, static planning cycles become too slow. The practical value of AI in this context lies less in grand autonomy than in faster demand sensing, scenario comparison, exception management, and inventory rebalancing.
RELEX said the findings point to a business environment where policy shifts, inflation pressure, and geopolitical disruption are continuing to reshape planning assumptions into 2026. For supply chain teams, that means pricing and inventory decisions can no longer be separated neatly from trade policy risk. They are part of the same operating problem.
The divergence in response also carries a competitive warning. Companies that read policy change early, adjust sourcing pragmatically, and avoid overcorrecting inventory can protect service without carrying unnecessary cost. Those that move too late tend to absorb the pressure first in margin and then in stock.
The next phase of this cycle looks less like emergency response and more like structural adaptation. Businesses are still dealing with the same underlying pressures, but the more durable question now is which planning models can absorb disruption without turning every policy shift into a full operational reset.
