Welcome to this week’s Supply Chain Radar, where payroll math goes sideways, AI hype meets accountability, and power dynamics are getting stress-tested. 💸🤖⚖️
Tariffs are tightening the screws on global brands like Birkenstock, while AI races ahead in marketing, fulfillment, and autonomy, sometimes faster than governance can keep up. Meanwhile, courts, Congress, and hyperscalers are quietly reshaping who holds the real leverage in supply chains.
👉 Scroll on for the debates, data points, and power shifts everyone in logistics is talking about.
What’s Your Take: TQL Commission Debacle 💸
A payroll error at Total Quality Logistics led some brokers to receive 25% commissions instead of the intended 20%, prompting the company to seek repayment. Affected employees were notified by email and asked to return overpayments exceeding $1,000, with no meetings held to address questions.
What’s your take? Would you pay your employer back?
Headed to Manifest 2026? Book an on-site meeting with Pesti Group, the agency behind some of the most visible brands in logistics. From media relations and campaign strategy to executive visibility and demand-gen storytelling, Pesti helps turn conference buzz into real momentum.
A survey by Lance Surety Bonds found nearly 75% of female truckers have turned down jobs due to safety concerns, with many citing harassment, discrimination, and unsafe rest stops. Despite strong work-life satisfaction, women are calling for safer facilities, clearer reporting channels, equal pay, and more leadership representation.
Birkenstock warns tariffs will hit harder in fiscal 2026 after frontloading and price hikes blunted the impact last year. Executives say pricing alone can’t protect margins, pushing the brand to lean on supply chain efficiencies, logistics improvements, and growth in the Asia-Pacific region to soften the blow.
As AI floods supply chain marketing, too many brands are trading credibility for convenience. At Manifest 2026, Pesti Group tackles this head-on with its must-see panel, “AI Slopocalypse,” unpacking real-world AI misfires—and how to use automation without destroying trust. The message: AI needs strategy, governance, and humans in the loop.
AI is rapidly reshaping online fulfillment, tackling the most expensive leg of delivery—the last mile. Retailers are using smarter routing, modular logistics platforms, and AI-powered returns management to cut costs and boost reliability, including integrations like OneRail with IBM. But legacy systems and data complexity still pose hurdles.
C.H. Robinson has filed its written brief with the Supreme Court of the United States in Montgomery v. Caribe, arguing federal law shields brokers from negligent-hiring liability. A key point: brokers aren’t required to carry federally mandated liability insurance, signaling Congress never intended them to be liable. Oral arguments are set for March 4.
For years, Apple set the pace for the global tech supply chain. Now, that power is shifting to AI and cloud giants like Nvidia and hyperscalers, which are capturing capacity and priority at suppliers such as TSMC. As AI demand surges, Apple is becoming just another very large customer.
Here’s the scoop on the SCR Egg-O-Meter: It’s a brand-new rating tool that checks out what the media said about business and supply chain execs in the past 30 days and scores them based on the tonality of mentions from a natural language processing algorithm.
The “Egg-o-Meter” is like a quirky kitchen gadget for measuring how well a supply chain leader can cook up success. It cracks open key traits—like adaptability, collaboration, and innovation—and scrambles them into a perfect leadership recipe. The goal? To avoid being a hard-boiled traditionalist or a runny risk-taker. It’s all about being the ideal sunny-side-up mix to lead teams through the ever-changing heat of the supply chain kitchen! 🍳📦
Ozgur Tohumcu, GM of Automotive and Mfg, AWS – 80.00%
As General Manager of Automotive and Manufacturing at Ozgur Tohumcu, the mission is to help the auto industry move from incremental automation to safe, scalable autonomy. Under his leadership, Amazon Web Services isembeddinggenerative and agentic AI into vehicle development, manufacturing and supply-chain decision-making.
That vision is playing out through AWS’spartnershipwith AUMOVIO, wherecloud-native AI accelerates autonomous testing and validation for customers like Aurora, helping surface rare safety scenarios and compress years of development into months.
The work also intersects with policy. As Congressrevisitsthe SELF DRIVEAct, debates around federal oversight, data access and safety standards are intensifying. Tohumcu has emphasized that autonomy must balance speed with trust—pairing rigorous validation, transparent data practices and resilient cloud infrastructure to ensure innovation keeps pace with both regulation and real-world safety demands.
Check out this recent interview of Tohumcu sharing details of this work on YouTube!
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