The Zero100 Podcast

As coding becomes democratized, who actually owns AI implementation: operations or IT? The answer isn't either/or. This week, VPs, Research & Advisory Lauren Acoba and Kelly Coutinho, and Senior Research Analyst Jalen Thibou, tackle the difference between vibe coding prototypes and running production-scale code across geographies with proper security. They expose the hidden language barrier causing pilots to falter, reveal the specific ownership boundaries needed to scale, and explain why both roles are expanding – not competing – in ways most leaders haven't considered.

Synthetic biology promises to revolutionize manufacturing, growing materials in fermentation tanks instead of relying on traditional industrial or agricultural sources. But can it scale? Zero100 Chief Content Officer Matt Davis sits down with Mathias Cousin, Managing Director at Monitor Deloitte and a SynBio veteran, to find out. Mathias reveals why manufacturing economics, not science, determines who survives, how AI is compressing design cycles from years to months, and why the biggest breakthroughs may come from replacing cows, not crude oil. With real-world examples, he shows what supply chain leaders need to understand as biological manufacturing moves from the lab to industrial reality.

Zero100 predicts that by 2030, 60% of supply chain’s functional activities will shift to automated or autonomous execution. But what happens to the workers in that equation? This week on the podcast, Zero100’s Matt Davis, Caroline Chumakov, and Lauren Acoba deliver the honest answer. Drawing from analyses of 413 solution providers and over a million job descriptions, they reveal how the division of labor is already shifting, explore and what work will remain distinctly human as data tasks move to automation and strategic judgment, supplier relationships, and systems thinking become the competitive advantage. With examples from BMW’s frontline upskilling programs and Fortune 100 adoption strategies, they show how winning companies bring entire workforces along this journey.

“If one more person brings me another pilot, they're getting fired," one C-level supply chain executive told Zero100 — and they’re far from alone in their frustration. Most companies are drowning in AI projects that never scale because they’re optimizing functions in isolation while ignoring how decisions actually flow across the business. The solution? PowerThreads: end-to-end AI-enabled workflows that connect sensing, deciding, and acting across organizational silos.
This week, VPs, Research & Advisory Lauren Acoba, Jenna Fink, and Geraint John break down the five core PowerThreads driving 95% of enterprise value, share a $300M sourcing transformation that required five years of unglamorous foundation-building, and explain why optimizing one bottleneck without understanding the full system often just moves the problem downstream.

Planning and sourcing should be natural partners. So why does it so often feel like they’re working out of sync? This week, VPs, Research Kelly Coutinho and Geraint John dissect the disconnect – and, more importantly, how to bridge it. They share how leading companies are turning functional friction into competitive advantage by using AI to translate demand signals into sourcing actions, creating continuous planning rhythms that keep both teams aligned, and building cross-functional crisis protocols built to survive disruption.