With volatility increasing and economic concerns growing, supply chain leaders are under intense pressure to maximize profits and avoid bottlenecks while remaining optimized. With the latest product release showcased at its annual customer conference, ICON 2025, Blue Yonder announced several AI-based Cognitive Solutions, accelerating long-range and intraday decision making for increased resiliency, resource leverage, and cost control. Blue Yonder also recently announced it has acquired Pledge.
With this product release, Blue Yonder advancements are focused on the following key areas:
1.) Cognitive Solutions Reimagine Supply Chain Management – Cognitive Solutions were designed to operate at machine speed, scale, and precision with AI natively built-in, enabling supply chain teams and AI to seamlessly coordinate decisions and quickly refine workflows across all parts of their supply chain from planning to execution to returns management. Created with an authentic cloud architecture for scale and access to advanced AI capabilities, the Cognitive Solutions on the Blue Yonder Platform utilize the AI data cloud to breakdown silos in the supply chain ecosystem and enable end-to-end interoperability through the power of unified decisioning on a multi-enterprise network. Cognitive Solutions are intelligent and agentic, offering reimagined experiences for users.
2.) Increased Agility To Address Mounting Business Uncertainty – Businesses can quickly evaluate risks and opportunities by aligning objectives and constraints using internal and external data sources, to reduce the time elapsed between planning and execution. And planners and operations managers can now build more scenarios on additional data in less time and then leverage the power of AI to pinpoint the most effective path for optimized execution quickly. And with a multi-enterprise network, businesses can use agentic AI to adjust operations in conjunction with trading partners to work around disruptions, optimize costs, and more.
3.) Optimized Cost-to-Serve With Speed of Delivery – Businesses can optimize capital resource output, reduce inventory waste, and identify hidden inefficiencies to maximize profits and minimize cost-to-serve with AI—and machine learning (ML)-driven analysis across their supply chain.
4.) Simplified, AI- and ML-Driven Decisioning – Building on over two decades of innovation in predictive analysis for supply chain management, Blue Yonder expanded AI leverage across these Cognitive Solutions while also implementing more sophisticated ML techniques. AI agents enable businesses to utilize and act on vast amounts of supply chain data to optimize decision-making, identify patterns, predict disruptions, and identify opportunities that humans might miss. Learn more about Blue Yonder’s AI agents here.
With Cognitive Solutions for supply chain planning, Blue Yonder offers end-to-end and concurrent planning based on a common set of services and data. This release provides both manufacturers and retailers with new capabilities. Manufacturers can optimize planning and boost profits by swiftly analyzing demand in unison with supply from across a multi-tier network of supply partners and collaborating easily with suppliers and carriers to ensure they have the right materials to meet their specific requirements.
Retailers can enhance range decisions with near real-time across sales, stock buying, inventory management, and financial management processes using the Blue Yonder Platform’s unified and centralized data management structure. And this gives retailers the planning speed and flexibility they need to accelerate inventory turnover and minimize waste, even as customer and business demands evolve.
Some of the new features in this release include:
- AI-driven Demand and Supply Planning
- Multi-tier planning and orchestration
- Solver enhancements, along with new insight and optimization tools
- Dynamic integrated business planning
- Enhanced inventory management for retail
- End-to-end assortment planning for softlines retail
Blue Yonder also delivers its next-generation warehouse management solution built natively on the Blue Yonder platform. The new capabilities available at customer warehouses include:
– Improve equipment tracking in the yard
– Enable the next phase in people-robot collaboration
– Support retail store replenishment from the warehouse
– Returns process and tracking for added visibility
Blue Yonder also revealed a new sustainability offering, Sustainable Supply Chain Manager, which integrates carbon and waste management with supply chain management. This new integration will help Blue Yonder customers reduce waste and pollution while cutting costs — a win-win for the business and the environment.
Blue Yonder’s Sustainable Supply Chain Manager enables customers to measure carbon emissions and optimize transportation carbon emissions scenarios.
Supply Chain Advisory
At the ICON event, Blue Yonder also revealed the newly formed Supply Chain Advisory, which provides deep industry solutions and data science expertise to guide customers through their digital transformation journeys and adoption of Blue Yonder’s solutions and AI agents.
The Supply Chain Advisory helps customers handle supply chain complexity, tackle tough challenges, avoid potential missteps, and keep ahead of what’s next. The team engages customers from the beginning of their project via workshops to guide their digital transformation and remains a strategic advisor throughout their entire lifecycle. And the team signifies the next phase in Blue Yonder’s Customer Experience strategy, engaging in close collaboration with the implementation team, Customer Success, and partners to advance customer success.
An Agent Activation Advisory will work closely with customers to develop AI agents that help them unlock greater value from their Blue Yonder solutions.
Acquisition Of Pledge Earth
Blue Yonder also recently acquired the business of Pledge Earth Technologies, which will enhance its existing platform to include globally accredited logistics CO2e emissions reporting that allows customers to monitor their emissions and those of their trading partners and suppliers. Learn more here.
What Pledge does: Pledge offers software solutions to empower enterprise supply chain teams and LSPs to meet their sustainability goals and Scope 3 emissions reporting requirements. Established in 2021 in the UK, Pledge brings accessibility and transparency to freight emissions measurement and reporting, enabling businesses to confidently measure, manage, and help reduce their carbon footprint.
Pledge’s capabilities automate the collection and exchange of shipment data from logistics suppliers to facilitate accredited and traceable emissions calculations across all transport modes, such as air, inland (e.g., truck, rail, barges), and sea. And Blue Yonder customers can extend their applicable Blue Yonder solutions to include this new capability, enabling them to receive emissions reporting that is in conformance with the Global Logistics Emission Council (GLEC) framework, developed by the Smart Freight Center (SFC), and aligned with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14083: Greenhouse gases, demonstrating accuracy and reliability.
Many carbon tracking tools are built for tracking single-party data and do not integrate into the carrier network, thus lacking the network effect and limiting the scope and accuracy of data. And by embedding this data into the Blue Yonder Platform, Blue Yonder customers can choose to extend their applicable Blue Yonder solutions to include this new capability will be able to understand the timely and precise emissions impact of their supply chain decisions. This enables them to manage their end-to-end transportation and logistics practices and comply with global regulations and reporting obligations (including CSRD, SBT,i and CDP) through proactive audit readiness.
Many areas of the supply chain, like carbon emissions tracking, could be optimized through quantitative analysis, such as avoiding empty miles, reducing fuel consumption, and utilizing resources/materials. With this new capability, businesses gain data-driven clarity on the carbon emissions and air pollution impacts from their operations and those of their trading partners.
Through its wealth of sustainability and software engineering expertise, the team at Pledge will join Blue Yonder to support its mission to transform global supply chain management. These new features are now available to all Blue Yonder customers, and Blue Yonder will continue to support existing Pledge customers.
Key Quotes About New Product Release
“Our latest product release helps businesses tackle volatility, improve profit margins, and reduce complexity. By leveraging our AI-powered, platform-driven Cognitive Solutions, directly connected to the Blue Yonder Network, companies can achieve unprecedented agility and resilience, enabling them to anticipate and respond to market changes with speed and precision. This empowers our customers to not only meet current demands but also to strategically position themselves for future growth and success.”
Duncan Angove, CEO, Blue Yonder
“Over the past few years, businesses have been able to scale global supply chains through technology; however, this progress has come at a cost to the environment as supply chains today account for most of global carbon emissions. The good news is that this same technology can be used to address sustainability impacts in the supply chain. We’re excited by our new offering that provides actionable data and optimization capabilities to address emissions and waste in the supply chain, helping businesses meet their sustainability goals.”
Saskia van Gendt, chief sustainability officer, Blue Yonder
“We understand the growing complexity of modern supply chains and the transformative potential of AI. Our customers look to Blue Yonder as a trusted advisor to navigate tough challenges and identify opportunities. The Supply Chain Advisory is here to help them embrace innovation and rethink how work is done, ensuring they achieve their vision with the guidance of experienced professionals.”
Andrea Morgan Vandome, chief innovation officer, Blue Yonder
Key Quotes About Pledge Acquisition
“The ability to easily and accurately quantify precise emissions is a huge win for our customers’ sustainability initiatives, but it’s also more than that – it’s about what you can do with that information. By gaining more insight on the environmental impact of their logistics operations, businesses can find ways to reduce cost, improve accountability for logistics service providers’ transportation emissions, and target specific inefficiencies for improvement. Blue Yonder’s aim has always been to give customers much-needed visibility into their end-to-end supply chain; this new capability will pave the way for smarter, more efficient and greener supply chains.”
Saskia van Gendt, chief sustainability officer, Blue Yonder
“Blue Yonder’s upcoming, strategic acquisition of Pledge’s capabilities will aide in tackling the intricate challenges of modern supply chain and sustainability management. In an era where corporate social responsibility and ESG initiatives are non-negotiable, accredited emissions reporting is the gold standard for high-quality data. By seamlessly integrating a proven, successful product into its platform, Blue Yonder will help propel its customers towards smarter, more impactful sustainability management.”
Bjoern Stengel, global sustainability research and practice lead, Sustainable Strategies and Technologies, IDC
“At Pledge, we believe that technology is a powerful catalyst in the fight against climate change. By joining forces with Blue Yonder, we are multiplying our reach and our impact, giving the largest enterprise supply chains on the planet access to the tools they need to measure, report, and cut carbon.”
David de Picciotto, CEO and co-founder, Pledge
