The outbreak of covid-19 laid bare the vulnerabilities of global, interconnected supply chains. National lockdowns triggered months-long manufacturing shutdowns. Mass disruption across international trade routes sparked widespread supply shortages. And wild fluctuations in demand rendered tried-and-tested inventory planning and forecasting tools useless. "It was the black swan event that nobody had accounted for, and it threw traditional measures for risk and resilience out the window," says Matthias Winkenbach, director of research at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics.

When clothing designers place an order at Katty Fashion's factory in Iași, Romania, they expect a bespoke service. If necessary, the factory will even rejig its production lines to make whichever garment a designer commissions. "From order to order, we may have to adapt," says Eduard Modreanu, the company's technical lead. "We cannot create one production line or shop floor that fits everyone." This adaptability is useful given the many diverse clients and orders Katty Fashion juggles, but it could also help future-proof the company against climate shocks.

China has banned the export of rare but critical earth minerals used in the manufacture of important semiconductors to the United States in the latest move in an ongoing tech war between the two superpowers. Beijing's announcement on Tuesday came just one day after the US ramped up restrictions on the export of advanced chips to China, which affects the country's ability to develop advanced weapons systems and artificial intelligence. So why is a "tech war" brewing between China and the US, and why does it matter? For months, the two countries have been involved in tit-for-tat export restrictions. The US hopes to cripple China's military and artificial intelligence (AI) advances as well as hamper its ambitions to become a global leader in clean energy and other technologies.

Angie Wisdom and Dr. Chirag Shah discuss how artificial intelligence could play a role in online and professional relationships. Humans may remain in vital roles as artificial intelligence begins to reshape many industries, but one expert argued that the global supply chain and shipping jobs may realize full automation within the next 20 years. "Right now, there's documented success in utilizing autonomous driving, but when we talk on when and how long [to fully automate], well, it's here now," Dr. Larry D. Parker Jr., department chair, supply chain & logistics, at American Public University System, told Fox News Digital. "Every industry that we've mentioned, the trucking, the air and all the other modes of cargo … right now, there's documented success in utilizing autonomous driving. But when we say fully [automated], I would say it will probably within the next 20 years."

At a cotton gin in the San Joaquin Valley, in California, a boxy machine helps to spray a fine mist containing billions of molecules of DNA onto freshly cleaned Pima cotton. That DNA will act as a kind of minuscule bar code, nestling amid the puffy fibers as they are shuttled to factories in India. There, the cotton will be spun into yarn and woven into bedsheets, before landing on the shelves of Costco stores in the United States. At any time, Costco can test for the DNA's presence to ensure that its American-grown cotton hasn't been replaced with cheaper materials -- like cotton from the Xinjiang region of China, which is banned in the United States because of its ties to forced labor. Amid growing concern about opacity and abuses in global supply chains, companies and government officials are increasingly turning to technologies like DNA tracking, artificial intelligence and blockchains to try to trace raw materials from the source to the store.

TradeWindow, led by AJ Smith, an experienced innovator and investor in rapid-growth companies, offers digital solutions designed to deliver increased value and transparency to exporters, importers, freight forwarders and customs brokers to maximise productivity and minimise cost. Their digital trade platform enables organisations in global trade to securely exchange data across the supply chain ecosystem, while seamlessly integrating into their back-end operations. TradeWindow's solutions allow information sharing and collaboration with global supply chain stakeholders to provide instantaneous access through their enterprise-grade platform. With TradeWindow, users can access an immutable record of activity created in the platform. This single source of data improves visibility across customers, ports, terminals, shipping lines, banks, insurance companies and government authorities.

DP World is continuing its rapid growth in India's technology market, with the launch of its latest innovation centre in Gurugram, which will soon host 240 staff working on critical solutions for global supply chains. DP World's presence has grown rapidly to match its ambitions in the digital trade sphere. The company had just 50 employees in India working on technology solutions at the beginning of 2021. This number has already grown to more than 450 with the opening of three centres this year. As this exponential growth continues, employee headcount is expected to reach as many as 700 by the middle of next year.

The machines, robots, IIoT devices, and applications used in the global supply chain create a deluge of structured and unstructured data. This has led to the emergence of advanced artificial intelligence- (AI) and machine learning-based solutions, designed to make sense of all this information and transform it into actionable insights for industry. AI-powered supply chain technologies bring order to the chaos of all this data. The benefits of applying AI to complex operational data are clear: enhanced visibility into the supply chain, faster decision-making, reduced cycle times, predictive analysis of big data, improved quality, productivity and throughput, greater supply chain resilience, and the ability to continuously tweak and improve your processes based on real-time insights into system performance. AI also empowers companies to make intelligent predictions about items as diverse as demand for a particular product or when to replenish stocks of raw materials used in manufacturing processes.

For more than 50 years, Davos, the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, has been an important barometer of economic, political, social, and environmental issues affecting the future of the world. So, what topics are driving the agenda for Davos 2022? The global supply chain crisis has taken on a new meaning. As the pandemic spread rapidly in 2020 and lingered in 2021, the general consensus was that disruptions to the global supply chain would be temporary albeit costly. But in 2022, it is clear that fragile supply chain may exist in a perpetual state of disruption for quite some time. In fact, the global supply chain was always in a fragile state; the pandemic laid bare just how vulnerable it was all along.

In the innovative world of startups, a good idea can lead to a great one. A few years ago, Australian sisters Naomi Vowels and Frances Atkins created a children's book with a difference. They invited customers to go online and input a child's name so that child could be made part of the story in a printed personalized copy. The model was monetizable and scalable. And, best of all, everyone loved the books – including the kids.