Exiger Executive Forum - Elevating the Conversation

The Rise of Autonomous Supply Chains

WEDNESDAY 18th November 2026, 6:30 PM GMT

Great scotland yard hotel, London SW1A 2HN

Supply chains are entering a new phase, one where AI does more than surface insights.

It recommends actions, executes workflows, and increasingly operates alongside human decision-makers. The shift toward autonomy promises speed and scale, but it also introduces new risks, new blind spots, and new responsibilities.

This forum explores what autonomous supply chains actually mean in practice. We will examine the cognitive dissonance leaders face when delegating judgment to machines, the emerging culture of rapid AI development (“vibe coding”), and the implications of AI-generated courses of action in high-stakes environments. We will also address the security and cyber risks that accompany automation, and the practical reality of the Pareto principle, where AI completes 80% of tasks effectively, but the remaining 20% still demands human oversight.

For supply chain, procurement, technology, and risk leaders, this discussion will focus on how to design autonomy deliberately balancing speed with control, augmentation with accountability, and innovation with defensibility.

The agenda includes expert-led insights on:

From Insight to Action; What Autonomy Actually Means in Practice. The difference between AI that informs a decision, AI that recommends one, and AI that executes it without asking, and why most organisations have not decided which of the three they are buying.
The Cognitive Dissonance of Delegated Judgment. Leaders say they want machine speed but instinctively withhold trust at the moment of consequence. Where that hesitation is sound risk management, where it is simply friction, and how to tell the difference before it becomes a competitive gap.
Vibe Coding and the Governance Gap. The term Karpathy coined in 2025, and Collins made word of the year, describes building software by prompting an AI and shipping what it produces without reading it. Fine for a weekend prototype. Very different when that code sits inside a workflow that releases payments, commits inventory, or contacts a supplier. What happens when build speed outruns the review capacity meant to contain it.
AI-Generated Courses of Action in High-Stakes Environments. When machines propose the plan, human review becomes the control point, and review capacity becomes the bottleneck. How to structure escalation, override, and audit so that a machine-authored plan remains a decision someone can defend.
Security, Cyber, and the Expanded Attack Surface. Autonomous workflows create new dependencies, new privileges, and new opportunities for manipulation, including prompt injection, poisoned data, and compromised agent credentials. Why automation changes the shape of third-party and cyber risk, not just its volume.
The Pareto Reality; The 80% That Works and the 20% That Decides. AI completes most tasks effectively. The residual 20% is where the exceptions, the edge cases, and the reputational events live. How leading organisations resource, staff, and defend that 20% instead of assuming it away.
What Breaks Next. How regulatory expectations on AI accountability, geopolitical fragmentation, and embedded technology risk will reshape autonomous operating models over the next 12–24 months.

Agenda

6:30 PM – Welcome drinks
7:00 PM – Discussion & debate
8:00 PM – Dinner, discussion & networking
11:45 PM – Close

Host & Speakers

Matthew
Heibel

HOST & MODeRATOR,
Geopolitical Consultant,
Aspen Institute Central Europe

Koray
Köse

CEO and Chief Analyst, Köse Advisory & Senior Fellow, GlobSEC Geotech Centre & Board Member, Slave-Free Alliance

More speakers to be announced

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About the Forum Series

It’s 2026, and the rules of resilience are relentlessly changing;

Maps; redrawn Rules; rewritten Technology; reinvented Value; redefined

Each Exiger Executive Forum explores these themes, convening elite voices from politics, industry, technology, and underlying supply chains, to equip leaders with the frameworks and foresight needed to navigate the multipolar era.