How far down can you see?

Keynote · Day 1 · 14 October · Risk & Resilience

Vikram Kulkarni and Alexandre Pougnaud of Volvo Group Purchasing give the second keynote of CPO Outlook 2026 on 14 October, together with Ulrika Hallström, VP Advisory at Prewave. The subject is supplier risk at a scale most functions never see: more than 18,000 suppliers and over one million sub-suppliers. The question underneath it is one every function shares: how far into the supply base can you actually see, and what do you do with what you find.

Disruption is no longer the exception

Tariffs that change between the order and the delivery. A sub-supplier’s factory three tiers down that stops for reasons nobody upstream knew about. A regulation that applies to a supplier of a supplier. For a procurement function in 2026 this is the operating environment, not a scenario to plan for.

What that looks like in practice is in Prewave’s own Supply Chain Risk Analysis published on 8 September. The WMO now puts the likelihood of El Niño persisting through February 2027 at nearly 100%, the first time an update has been that unequivocal, and Prewave traces where it is already acting on supply chains: Panama Canal transits capped at 34 a day and falling to 32 from 15 September, with priority auction slots averaging USD 1.1 million in August, sixteen times the level a year earlier; natural rubber near its highest price since 2013, with the EU entirely import-dependent; India’s warmest August since 1901 and hydropower down nearly 12%, with the exposure concentrated in Tier 2 and Tier 3 forging, casting and heat-treatment operations that feed European OEM build schedules directly. Prewave’s own observation on rubber is the one to underline: the exposure procurement teams routinely miss is not the tyre, it is the seals, gaskets, hoses and mounts, low-value, high-count, often single-sourced, and capable of stopping a line.

The functions that handle it well are not the ones with the fewest disruptions. They are the ones that find out first. That puts the weight on a question most functions cannot yet answer with confidence: how far into the supply base can you actually see?

Where Nordic functions stand

EBG’s own data shows how far there is to go. In EBG’s spring 2025 survey in Gothenburg, three-quarters of respondents named lack of visibility beyond Tier 1 as their single biggest risk management challenge. Across EBG’s 2025 and 2026 surveys, 74% of Nordic procurement leaders still struggle with poor data, and only around 5% have integrated AI into their decisions.

Put those two facts together and the picture is clear. Most functions know their direct suppliers well and the tiers below them hardly at all, and the data foundation that would change that is still being built. Risk management in that position is largely reactive by necessity. The interesting question is what it takes to move it forward, and what that looks like when it has been done at scale.

What the keynote covers

Volvo Group Purchasing will speak for itself in the room. What the programme states is this: the session covers how AI-driven insights create transparency across more than 18,000 suppliers and over one million sub-suppliers, enable risk identification at scale, and support a shift to a proactive approach, with 60% faster disruption mitigation.

Three things in that description are worth noticing before you hear it. The scale: one million sub-suppliers is not a list anyone maintains by hand. The word proactive: the difference between reacting to a disruption and acting before it lands is a difference in when you know, which is a data question before it is a process question. And the number: 60% faster mitigation is an outcome measured after the event, which is the kind of figure that lets a function show risk work on someone else’s scorecard.

Vikram Kulkarni is Head of End-to-End Risk Management and Alexandre Pougnaud is Head of Taskforce Management, both at Volvo Group Purchasing.

From the stage to the table

Later the same morning, Prewave hosts a Theme Discussion, Evolving Supply Chain Resilience with AI: From Risk Management to Strategic Opportunity, where the room takes the topic to a table and compares its own situation.

The practical question to bring to Stockholm: for your most critical category, how many tiers down can you name the supplier today, and how did you find out the last time something went wrong there?