DELIVER America 2026

Tariffs, cost pressure, demand swings and service promises are all moving at once. As US import volumes face double-digit year-over-year declines in several forecast months, retailers are being forced to rethink how they plan, price, source and protect availability in real time.

We will examine how retailers are responding as tariffs, cost pressure, demand swings, and customer service expectations all shift at once. 

Enjoy the event's gourmet cuisine, while taking advantage of additional networking opportunities.

Get ready to discover the best suppliers in the retail and commerce industry! The ceremony takes place in the conference area.

Sponsored by Knight-Swift Supply Chain

A space to reflect on the future of retail leadership and how today's leaders can open doors for tomorrow's, sharing stories and ideas with allies to nurture the next generation and create a more inclusive industry. RSVP essential.

What would it take to build a supply chain that can sense change, make smarter decisions and continuously adapt?
Drawing on her book Self-Driving Supply Chains, Deborah Dull will unveil a practical five-step framework for moving beyond fragmented technology initiatives towards a truly intelligent, resilient and adaptive operating model.
This keynote will explore how leading organisations can bring together data, AI, automation and human expertise to accelerate decision-making, respond to disruption and create the capabilities needed for the next generation of supply chain management.

Creating a seamless customer experience is only part of the omnichannel story. Behind it lies the challenge of sustaining eCommerce growth while managing cost-to-serve, returns, rising customer expectations and increasingly complex inventory and fulfillment decisions.

Drawing on MIT CTL’s fifth annual survey of more than 600 supply chain leaders, this session will examine how stores support omnichannel fulfillment, the technologies respondents consider increasingly relevant, and how AI is evolving from targeted applications toward a strategic enabler of end-to-end supply chain orchestration, providing leaders with an evidence-based view of where omnichannel stands and what’s expected next.

As customer expectations rise and operational complexity increases, intelligent fulfillment has become a powerful driver of profitable growth. Drawing on THG’s proven approach, Tom will explore how proprietary fulfillment technology, automation and robotics can help brands improve operational efficiency, elevate the customer experience and turn logistics into a genuine competitive advantage.

For years, dispatch has been treated as a back-office logistics function, a fixed set of routing rules running quietly behind the scenes. That model is breaking down. As customer expectations rise and fulfillment options multiply (in-house fleet, third-party gig, regional carrier, big-and-bulky), retailers need dispatch decisions that respond in real time to performance, profitability, and flexibility, not static logic trees.

But this shift isn't just about internal efficiency, it's about what customers actually feel. Delivery promise engines have become skilled at setting expectations at checkout, but a promise is only as good as the dispatch system behind it. In this session, Jake Stein, VP of Retail Growth at Burq, will unpack what the next era of dispatch actually looks like in practice: how AI-driven decisioning reshapes node and fulfillment channel selection in real time, how active dispatch works together with promise engines to keep delivery windows accurate (not just fast), and what retailers should measure to know if their current dispatch approach is quietly eroding customer trust.

North America’s parcel and LTL sector faces significant disruption and change creating new challenges along with new opportunities for automotive shippers to control costs, negotiate better rates and strengthen their parts logistics and distribution strategies.

The parcel and LTL logistics market is evolving rapidly, with shifting freight rates, exposure to sustained higher fuel costs and the emergence of a major a new provider in B2B logistics reshaping the competitive landscape. This session will explore the key dynamics affecting automotive shippers and provide practical insight into managing costs, identifying opportunities, and responding to changing market conditions. Attendees will gain practical negotiation tactics for securing better rates, maximizing discounts, and improving carrier contract terms, alongside insight into the short and longer-term impact Amazon’s expanding role in the B2B supply chain.

How can fulfillment centers connect picking and packaging to reduce manual handling and improve efficiency? In this session, Macro, Global Sales Director at CMC, will explore how AS/SR and CMC can integrate storage, manual or robotic picking, and automated right-sized packaging through a connected Pick-to-VaryTote flow. The presentation will examine how VaryTote and CMC Genesys link picking to packaging, with buffering options that allow these operations to run independently when needed. Attendees will learn how this approach can reduce touchpoints and packaging material use while creating a path toward zero-touch fulfillment.

Your customer acquisition cost doesn't pay off on the first order. It pays off on the second, the third, the annual subscription, the referral. For international ecommerce, the delivery experience is the variable that determines whether any of that happens.

This session reframes international shipping as a retention and LTV decision, not a logistics one. Helaine Rich of ePost Global walks through the commercial math of Shadow Loss: what a three-point drop in international repeat purchase rate costs a DTC brand at scale, what the Canada Post strike revealed about which brands were protecting post-purchase LTV and which weren't, and what a resilient international delivery program actually looks like behind the scenes.

Practical, data-grounded, and built for the ecommerce leader who owns both the acquisition budget and the churn rate.
 

The moment an order is placed, a series of fulfillment decisions determines its profitability. Warehouse, carrier, shipping service, routing logic and delivery promises all play a part. In this session, Linnworks will share how leading ecommerce brands automate these decisions using intelligent rules to optimise cost, speed and customer satisfaction across multiple carriers and fulfillment partners, helping teams scale efficiently without adding operational overhead.

For global retailers, some of the most consequential inventory decisions happen thousands of miles from the store and weeks before products reach their destination market. With margins under pressure and demand increasingly difficult to predict, waiting until goods arrive at a distribution centre to react can already be too late. In this fireside chat, Tony Zasimovich, Global Retail Vertical Lead at DP World, will explore the growing importance of the “origin” stage of the retail supply chain. The discussion will look at how purchase order visibility and closer coordination with suppliers can give retailers earlier insight into what is being produced, when it will be ready and how inventory should move.

Drawing on the realities of sourcing from major Asian manufacturing markets, the conversation will examine how earlier visibility can create more options from consolidating or redirecting shipments, prioritising inventory, choosing different transport modes and responding to changing demand before goods are committed to their final journey. In an era of tighter margins, could the next frontier of inventory optimisation be upstream rather than inside the warehouse?

The order stack that got brands and 3PLs here will not carry them into agentic commerce. Legacy systems are too rigid and too disconnected for what's coming, and the gap is about to get expensive. Drawing on what he sees across enterprise evaluations, Pipe17's Matt Burroughs moves past the slideware to what actually breaks as order volume scales, which modernization patterns work, and which ones quietly fail. He frames the shift to Order Operations (OrderOps), the AI-native layer that unifies commerce from order capture through fulfillment, and makes the case for why it becomes the growth engine in a post-web, agent-driven market. A candid, forward-looking session on orchestrating disconnected systems, making exception management proactive with AI, and preparing order operations for what comes after the buy button.

Everything flows through loading docks, but it’s no faster to load a trailer today than it was 50 years ago. Truckers spend 23% of their workday idling at docks while forklift operators rush to move freight between trailers and staging areas. Meanwhile, 25% of warehouse injuries are occurring at the dock, and OSHA reports are on the rise. 

Slip Robotics is on a mission to change that. Join us as Slip Robotics' CRO Alex Allen-Tunsil discusses how our customers unlocked their dock operations with automated trailer loading and unloading, along with the profound impact of adopting a modernized dock strategy. At this talk, you’ll gain: 

• Real Results: Tangible benefits realized—speed, safety, savings, and more.

• Unorthodox Solutions: A different way to envision your dock and realize its maximum potential

• Network-Level Insights: An understanding of the dock at a system level, and how leading industry retailers are driving unprecedented operational efficiency.

As e-commerce brands look for more flexible, reliable, and cost-efficient delivery options, technology-driven last-mile carriers are playing a growing role in shaping the future of commerce. This session explores how intelligent technology, localized operations, network density, and data-driven execution are reshaping last-mile delivery in the U.S. market. Vincent Amato, Chief Sales Officer at GOFO, will share insights on building a scalable delivery network, improving delivery reliability, optimizing costs, and strengthening customer trust.

eCommerce volumes continue to grow, urban warehouse space is increasingly constrained, and the conveyor-based systems most fulfillment centers rely on were not designed for either challenge. These systems perform well under steady demand, but struggle when volumes fluctuate, and reconfiguring them typically requires weeks of downtime and significant capital investment.

In this session, Unbox Robotics will share a different approach: moving sortation off the floor and into the vertical space above it, using mobile robots coordinated by software rather than fixed infrastructure.

Every peak season, the same work lands on the same people. Someone guesses a delivery date. Someone decides which carrier to use, again. Someone hunts for an order at the pack bench. Someone answers "where is my order" a few hundred times.

Doing that work by hand costs more than the hours it takes. A guessed delivery date loses the sale. A carrier picked out of habit overpays on every order. Meanwhile the shippers who handed those jobs to AI are converting more shoppers and spending less to hit the same delivery date.

This session covers five peak-season jobs shippers no longer need to do themselves, what it takes to turn each one over to machine learning and AI agents, and what it's worth when they do. One shipper found six figures in savings in twelve days, without renegotiating a single carrier rate.

Focus: Retailers are making decisions in a market where landed cost, sourcing risk, consumer demand and service expectations are all shifting at the same time. This roundtable asks how leaders decide what to absorb, what to pass on, what to redesign and what promises they can still afford to make.

Key Topics: Tariff exposure, margin protection, sourcing flexibility, pricing decisions, inventory buffers, customer promise accuracy, scenario planning, executive decision-making.

Sponsored by parcelLab

Customers experience one promise, but delivering it requires coordination across demand planning, inventory placement, fulfillment, stores, carriers, delivery operations, technology, and customer service. This discussion would explore how retailers can create an integrated operating model that balances speed, cost, availability, reliability, and customer experience.

Discussion areas:

• Who should own the end-to-end customer promise?
• How should inventory, fulfillment, transportation, and delivery decisions connect?
• Where do handoffs most commonly break down?
• Which capabilities should be centralized versus locally managed?
• How should retailers manage trade-offs between speed, cost, and reliability?
   

Same-day delivery is often treated as a loss-leader you tolerate to defend market share. Rohlik runs it at scale across 8 European markets and has grown to over $1.9B in revenue while delivering an only online same day grocery proposition.  This session unpacks the actual cost drivers behind same-day at scale, where the money leaks, and which levers move contribution margin the most. It is a candid look at the numbers, offered as a European reference point rather than a template to copy.

Key topics: delivery P&L breakdown, speed vs. drop density trade-offs, pricing same-day, which fixed costs are actually avoidable.

This interactive roundtable will bring supply chain leaders together to move beyond the AI hype and share what is delivering measurable operational impact. Participants will compare practical examples across forecasting, planning, inventory, labor and fulfillment, exploring what has genuinely changed, what remains stuck in pilot mode, and what it takes to redesign workflows successfully.

Sponsored by Swap Commerce

As brands grow, one of the biggest questions is what to own and what to outsource. This candid roundtable explores the tradeoffs between building in-house capabilities, co-manufacturing, 3PL and other strategic partnerships, and how to balance control, capital, speed and flexibility as you scale.

This interactive roundtable will explore how supply chain professionals are moving beyond simply using AI to building production-ready systems themselves. Participants will share how domain expertise, no-code tools and AI-assisted development are enabling non-engineers to solve operational challenges faster—and discuss the governance, skills and safeguards needed to turn frontline knowledge into scalable solutions.

Technology alone cannot solve today’s supply chain challenges. This session explores why resilient operations depend on three interconnected elements: engaged people, adaptable processes and a genuinely innovative mindset.

The discussion will examine how workplace culture, burnout and motivation directly affect operational performance; why traditional sourcing and tariff-mitigation playbooks struggle under real-world volatility; and how multi-region supplier strategies, strategic inventory and realistic lead times can strengthen resilience. It will also explore how AI, emerging technologies and risk-mitigation tools can create greater visibility, without treating software as a substitute for sound strategy.

Consumers have never expected more from last mile delivery. Faster fulfillment, tighter delivery windows, frictionless returns, real-time visibility, and low-cost shipping have become baseline expectations rather than premium services. At the same time, retailers, carriers, logistics providers, and technology companies are investing billions of dollars into automation, AI-driven routing, robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones, and micro-fulfillment solutions in an attempt to meet these rising demands.

Yet despite rapid advances in technology, the last mile remains one of the most operationally difficult, labor-intensive, and expensive segments of the supply chain.

If technology is advancing so quickly, why isn’t the last mile getting easier?

Through real-world examples, operational insights, and strategic frameworks, the session examines how organizations must balance customer expectations, delivery economics, labor realities, operational variability, and automation investments to create sustainable competitive advantage.

Freight invoices remain a major source of hidden margin leakage, with billing errors and overcharges quietly eroding profitability every cycle. Traditional three-way matching was never designed for the complexity of freight, where rates, fuel surcharges, accessorials, delivery records and contracts all need to align.

This session explores how AI-driven multi-way matching is changing that: identifying duplicate and inflated charges in real time, turning invoice exceptions into actionable carrier and lane insights, and giving finance and logistics teams a clearer view of true freight cost. In a volatile market, it is one of the fastest untapped levers for protecting margin.

Adjusting forecasts, positioning inventory, planning labour, managing promotions and building contingency into operations. With Black Friday fast approaching, this panel gets practical about how retailers are preparing for peak when demand is harder to predict. Speakers will share real-life scenarios, unpacking what changed, what worked, what did not, and the decisions teams can still make now to reduce risk before peak hits.