Global supply chains — still groggy from COVID-19 — are reeling from geopolitical instability that continues to undermine established patterns of trade. Simple rules-based automation struggles to cope with the complexity of supply chain exceptions. Agentic AI has the potential to solve supply chain challenges; however, to capitalize on these new opportunities, tech leaders need agents with a tightly defined scope to deliver reliable, explainable processes that are grounded in a common semantic model. They also need to elevate their enterprise governance and security and drive sufficient awareness to escalate exceptional cases to humans in the loop or on the loop.