TFEST25 Recap: 7 Lessons for European Supply Chain Leaders

TL;DR: TFEST25 ran two days at smartvillage Berlin with a Director-and-above delegate base and around 200 pre-scheduled 1:1 meetings. Seven lessons emerged, and the strongest was that agentic AI is landing in procurement first, not planning. The full TFEST25 agenda remains published session by session.

Rereading the TFEST25 agenda nine months on is a useful exercise, because it shows which themes were real and which were noise. Most of what was said about agentic AI in late 2025 has aged well. Most of what was said about timelines has not.

Seven lessons, each tied to a named session.

1. Procurement is where AI landed first, and that was not the consensus expectation

The strongest signal across both days was where AI was actually running rather than where it was being discussed. The procurement sessions carried production detail while the planning sessions carried ambition.

Ard Verboon, Chief Procurement Officer at Schneider Electric, ran a keynote panel titled "Building an AI-Powered Data Foundation for Hyper-Efficient Procurement", and the framing put the data foundation ahead of the application. A separate session, "From Seller Bias to Buyer Power: How Benchmarking and AI Transform Negotiation", covered the same ground from the negotiation side.

The reason procurement went first holds up: the failure cost is low, the data usually lives in one system, and the decisions repeat often enough to train against. A wrong supplier match costs a day. A wrong production sequence costs a quarter.

2. The control tower conversation shifted from visibility to action

TFEST24 and early TFEST25 material treated control towers as dashboards. By day two the framing had moved, and the session "From Crisis Mode to Command: Reinventing Digital Control Towers with Agentic AI" put the emphasis on the system taking action rather than reporting state.

That distinction turned out to be the durable one. A control tower that shows you a problem is a monitoring tool, and the organisations getting returns are the ones that gave the layer permission to act inside defined limits. Our guide to supply chain control towers follows this thread further.

3. Multipolar trade became a design constraint rather than a risk item

Two sessions carried the multipolar framing directly: "Maps Redrawn: Dominating Multipolar Value Chains" and "How AI is Key to Dominating Multipolar Value Chains". A third, "Adaptive Advantage: Building Resilient Value Chains in a Multipolar World", ran as a themed lunch discussion.

The shift worth noting is that multipolar trade stopped being filed under risk and started being filed under network design. Leaders were no longer asking how to hedge against fragmentation; they were asking how to design a network that assumes it. The 2026 tariff cycle has since made that the mainstream position, which we covered in the CSCO guide to the 2026 tariff cycle.

4. Schneider Electric put its whole leadership team on the record, and the depth showed

Most events get one executive from a large organisation. TFEST25 had six from Schneider Electric across the two days: Mourad Tamoud, Chief Supply Chain Officer, on supply chain as strategy; Verboon on procurement; Stuart Whiting, SVP Global Supply Chain; Thierry Tricot, SVP Global Supply Chain Europe; Brigitte Begasse on customer satisfaction and quality; and Vanessa Miler-Fels on environment and climate.

The lesson is about format rather than about Schneider. Getting a function's whole leadership layer into one agenda produces a coherent case study instead of a single polished keynote. Attendees could ask the procurement question and the sustainability question of two different people who report into the same operating model, and the answers had to reconcile.

5. The enterprise-leader transition was the most-attended talent conversation

"Keynote Panel: The Evolution from Functional to Enterprise Leader" addressed the career question sitting under most CSCO conversations, which is what happens when the supply chain remit expands past the supply chain.

Anita Arts, who has held CSCO and CPO roles and now sits as a non-executive director across portfolio companies, and Sarah Ricketts, SVP Procurement at Rolls-Royce, both spoke to the same underlying shift. A related session, "Forget the Seat, Build the Table: The Lost Art of PR in Procurement Leadership", made the uncomfortable version of the argument, which is that supply chain leaders lose enterprise influence partly because they communicate badly upward.

This theme has grown rather than faded, and it now runs through the TFEST26 agenda in sessions on the CFO and CSCO building the business case together.

6. Unilever's agentic customer-service work was the most advanced production example

Day two opened with a fireside chat on using agentic AI in supply chain and customer service at Unilever, anchored by Reginaldo Ecclissato, Chief Business Operations and Supply Chain Officer.

What made it the standout was that it was operating rather than piloted. Customer service is a good first target for the same reasons procurement is: high volume, repetitive decisions, bounded consequences, and a clear baseline to measure against. Most of the agentic material presented across the two days was forward-looking, and this session was not.

7. Sustainability stopped being a separate track and became a sourcing criterion

Scope 3 appeared inside procurement conversations rather than in a sustainability silo. The fireside chat "Scope 3 leadership: How do you tackle the Scope 3 challenge in Procurement" placed the problem where the decisions are made, and "Decarbonising your supply chain in 4 steps" took the operational route rather than the reporting one.

Sven Markert, CSCO of Smart Infrastructure at Siemens, and Torsten Pilz, Chief Supply Chain Officer at 3M, both contributed to sessions where sustainability sat inside a broader operating discussion. That structural choice, treating emissions as a criterion inside the sourcing decision rather than a report produced afterwards, is the one most organisations have still not made. We set out the detail in our Scope 3 explainer for CSCOs.

What we would change about TFEST25

Two honest criticisms, both of which shaped the 2026 design.

The themed lunch discussions were oversubscribed relative to the room capacity, and several delegates could not get into the table they wanted. TFEST26 runs more tables with published topics so delegates can choose in advance.

The second is that the agenda was dense enough that delegates with a full 1:1 meeting schedule missed sessions they had travelled for. Running three stages at the Colosseum Berlin gives more repeat slots, though the underlying tension between scheduled meetings and stage content does not fully resolve. A delegate who books ten meetings will still miss content, and that is a real trade-off rather than one we have designed away.

Where these themes go in 2026

The 2026 programme picks up all seven threads, with the agentic conversation moving from whether to how. Sessions include "Agentic AI in Supply Chain: Separating Hype from Production-Ready Reality", "Digital Twins in Practice: 3 Real Deployments, 3 Honest ROI Assessments", and "When the CFO and the CSCO Build the Business Case Together".

TFEST26 runs on 1 and 2 December 2026 at the Colosseum Berlin, with the same screened admission and scheduled-meeting model.

Save your seat at TFEST26 in Berlin, 1 and 2 December 2026

The complete TFEST25 session list stays published, and individual speaker pages carry the sessions each person ran. If you are weighing which European events belong in next year's calendar, our comparison of peer conferences and trade shows covers the format question before the shortlist question.