By Stephen F. DeAngelis
CEO, Enterra Solutions and Massive Dynamics
March 13, 2026
Princeton, NJ
Three things happened this week that, taken together, tell a story most CEOs haven’t fully absorbed.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Trade Representative opened sweeping new Section 301 investigations targeting over a dozen countries — including China, the EU, Mexico, Japan, and India — signaling that the tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court three weeks ago are coming back, just through a different door. The same day, Canada imposed another C$29.8 billion in retaliatory tariffs on American goods, its second round in nine days. And the World Economic Forum’s latest data confirms what practitioners already know: more than 3,000 new trade and industrial policy measures were introduced globally in 2025 alone — three times the annual level recorded a decade ago.
This is not a trade dispute. It is a structural rewiring of the global value chain.
I have spent the better part of three decades building technology that helps Fortune 500 companies optimize end-to-end value chains — from sourcing and manufacturing through logistics, pricing, and demand planning. What I am seeing now is different from anything in that span. Not because tariffs are new. Tariffs are old. What is new is the velocity of change, the simultaneity of disruption across multiple nodes, and the reality that traditional planning tools were never designed for an environment where the rules change faster than the planning cycle.
Consider the math. A company with a global supply network touching 40 countries now faces a tariff landscape that has shifted meaningfully — in some cases, by double digits — at least four times in the past 12 months. Each shift cascades: sourcing decisions change, landed costs change, margin structures change, pricing changes, and demand signals become unreliable because consumers are reacting to price volatility they don’t fully understand. The KPMG CEO Outlook released this week found that 52% of CEOs now cite policy uncertainty as the top pressure driving their short-term decisions, and 48% are actively modeling tariff mitigation strategies.
But here is the part that should concern every board: most of those mitigation strategies are reactive. They are spreadsheets catching up to yesterday’s announcement. They are sourcing shifts that take 18 months to execute in a world where the rules change every 18 days.
The WEF’s Global Value Chains Outlook for 2026 uses a phrase worth pausing on: “structural volatility.” Not a shock. Not a cycle. A permanent condition. The report finds that 74% of business leaders now prioritize resilience investments — and, critically, view resilience not as a cost center but as a growth driver.
I agree with that framing, but I would push it further. Resilience without intelligence is just expensive insurance. What companies actually need is the capacity to sense change across every node of the value chain simultaneously, model the downstream consequences in hours rather than weeks, and execute adjusted decisions autonomously — before the next announcement hits.
That is not a technology wish. That capability exists today in high-dimensional mathematics and autonomous decision systems that can decompose a value chain into its constituent variables and re-optimize across all of them at once. The companies that will navigate this era are not the ones with the best lobbyists or the most diversified supplier base — though both help. They are the ones whose decision architecture can absorb a tariff change at 8:00 AM and have re-optimized sourcing, pricing, and logistics by noon.
This is the new table stakes. And the gap between companies that understand this and companies that don’t is widening every week.
We are not going back to the old operating environment. The Thomson Reuters Global Trade Report found that 76% of trade professionals believe the current tariff posture represents a permanent approach that will persist for at least the next four years. The Conference Board reports that 43% of U.S. CEOs rank uncertainty itself as their top economic threat for 2026. The Supreme Court may have struck down one legal mechanism for tariffs, but the administration opened new trade investigations the same week, and no serious observer expects the trajectory to reverse.
The question for every CEO and board member is no longer whether to invest in value chain intelligence. It is whether your organization can make better decisions, faster, across more variables, than your competitors — in an environment where the rules of the game are rewritten while you are playing it.
That is the only question that matters right now.
Stephen F. DeAngelis is founder, president, and CEO of Enterra Solutions and co-founder of Massive Dynamics. He has served as Visiting Professional Executive in Cognitive Reasoning Platforms at Princeton University's Department of Chemistry, Visiting Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and a collaborator with MIT's Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL
