Thank you for reading 2026 CPO REPORT

KARIN MEURK-HARVEY | CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER | SMART DCC

I’ve spent two decades in commercial leadership roles across various sectors, including telecom, tech, and critical national infrastructure, in companies such as Smart DCC, Vodafone, and Ericsson.

During that time, I’ve seen a pressing and increasing need for procurement teams to gain broader visibility into supply chains and enhance their ability to make swift strategic decisions. My focus areas for 2026 are closely tied to this, specifically, how procurement teams can approach transparency in a different way.

connected, less stable economy, those bottlenecks risk appearing faster and traveling farther. This elevates a procurement problem to a business problem.

In 2026, procurement leaders must consider building genuine multi-tier transparency for critical value chains, enhanced analytics, and more resilient resource models. The companies that succeed in volatile markets are those that treat transparency as an asset, rather than a mere due diligence requirement.

1 2026 IS ABOUT GENUINE SUPPLY CHAIN VISIBILITY

2 AI AS A MEANS TO ENHANCED STRATEGIC JUDGMENT

Recent years have underscored that having oversight of tier one suppliers is nowhere near sufficient when it comes to achieving transparency in supply chains. Many of the risks that catch us out, disrupting delivery, inflating costs, slowing innovation, and jeopardizing customer trust, sit deeper in the chain. Consequently, some of our greatest opportunities to fundamentally shift outcomes lie deeper in the chain as well; opportunities for resilience, differentiation, speed, efficiency, and so on.

I’ve seen firsthand how bottlenecks in tiers 2 or 3 can compromise customers, and in a highly

Throughout my career, I’ve led numerous commercial transformations. While a lot of the technology focus often goes into process optimization, I argue that there is equal, if not greater, uplift to be gained from better intelligence. We have data all around us from right across the value chain (cost, contract, risks, customer patterns, etc.), which, until now, has been hard to collect, make sense of, and act upon.

Now we can. Process automation and headcount efficiencies are entry-level benefits of AI. We should be excited about this, but even more so about better intelligence and decision

KARIN MEURK-HARVEY | CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER | SMART DCC

enablement, which AI can enable. This is the next frontier.

AI initiatives may be nascent or, more likely, running wild in most firms. To realize the gains, in 2026, procurement teams must push beyond experimentation into a more coordinated and collaborative strategy. The risk of not doing this is that what we create will be even more complex and less governed than what came before, resulting in shadow agents and processes across the business that blur and confuse rather than simplify and improve.

We have a generational opportunity, which means

3 EMBEDDING SUSTAINABILITY INTO EVERYDAY COMMERCIAL DECISIONS

outlining a compelling commercial vision that aligns the organization around a coherent roadmap for data and the use of AI in procurement.

in the products we design, the services we offer, and the way we operate our company. In the energy sector, especially, sustainability isn’t optional; it is fundamental to relevance.
While some businesses in certain sectors may use recent events as an opportunity to pause their sustainability efforts, in 2026, many others should focus on accelerating their efforts and integrating sustainability into their commercial processes and decision-making. At DCC, my team built a responsible business strategy and carbon frameworks that reinforced sustainability as a key commercial lever, rather than something on the periphery.

There is a lot of talk about sustainability falling down the priority list, but that’s not my experience in the sectors where I have worked. Our customers are increasingly expecting us to adopt a sustainable approach

KARIN MEURK-HARVEY | CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER | SMART DCC

This meant that our teams and our suppliers had tangibility. They can clearly understand the importance of the topic at DCC, and therefore position it as a value lever in strategies and approaches. We can assess the sustainability impact in a comprehensive manner as a “total value equation.”

One of my favorite examples of this comes from a supplier negotiation where the supplier rejected a traditional volume-based discount structure. Instead, they asked us to achieve earlier and more accurate forecasts.

With better visibility, they could run factories more efficiently and optimize their own supply chain (such as reducing ad hoc air freight and replacing with sea freight). This gave us both a win in terms of cost and carbon. That is what it looks like when sustainability becomes commercially intelligent.

Sustainability must be embedded in the choices made every day, not just the commitments made annually. The only way to do that is to embed it in every commercial strategy, process, and decision.

WATCH KARIN'S FULL INTERVIEW
IN CONVERSATION WITH SIMON GEALE

The companies that succeed in volatile markets are those that treat transparency as an asset rather than due diligence."

KARIN MEURK-HARVEY, CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER