Last week I attended JDA’s annual FOCUS event in Orlando with my partner, Paula Rosenblum. The company has been through a tremendous amount of change the past few years, and while CEO Girish Rishi was essentially introducing himself to the audience at this event last year, his keynote this year took a markedly different tone: the company is preparing for what it calls “the pursuit of the autonomous supply chain. ”

Before announcing this moonshot (their words, and personally I like the term), Rishi outlined the three macro trends driving new initiatives:

1. Local as the new global

2. Hyperpersonalization, and

3. Technology at the edge

Questions like “Where are your factories? ” and “Where are your transportation facilities? ” are the driving forces behind the company’s localization efforts. In his words, “It’s time to localize them all. ” And as it relates to personalization (and see Brian’s article on that very topic this week), the CEO noted that term once applied to monogramed shirts: now anyone – not just 25-35-year-olds – are taking the opportunity to personalize their cars, even their shoes. But what grabbed me most was the company’s shift in its forward-looking view on the role technology should play. It no longer cares whether a retailer chooses to implement via cloud or on-premise; what matters most is that technology increasingly lives at the edge. This is a decidedly new take for JDA. And while the past few years have drawn up many questions about the value of certain acquisitions, the presence of seemingly redundant technologies, and the overall direction JDA was carving out for its future, this tack is new. And believable. The notion of designing scalable systems that will last a long time – and have the ability to roll with the changing times as they come – was on-point, and one that ran throughout several other presentations over both days.

As with most conferences this season, there was a lot of talk about AI. The company has committed $500m in the next 3 years for R&D specific to AI, machine learning, and IoT-based solutions. However, what’s especially cool (for me, at least) is they invite analysts to come see it while it’s still being developed. During a trip to JDA Labs in Montreal last summer I got an in-person presentation on a solution that, at the time, was aiming to help a nameless tire manufacturer predict when customers would most likely need new tires. Last week, I got to watch Michelin present exactly what it’s gotten from that endeavor – in their words, a journey to a self-learning supply chain that began with a desire to fix supply chain disruptors before they happen. Today, they’ve applied machine learning to millions of data points to become more predictive. As a result, they can now accurately predict failures two weeks before they happen. Earlier in the day, in his keynote, Girish stated his personal belief: that “supply chain is cool. ” Stuff like this helps him back that up.

So is a fully autonomous supply chain something we’ll see in our lifetimes? Over the two days multiple presenters from various positions in JDA, at retail clients, and even a futurist or two took their shot at proving why it would. To me? It’s still a moonshot. But just as with the original moonshot, timing and teamwork are everything. And that brings me to my final point. Several of the one-on-one conversations I had with high-up executives in the company teased out a concept around where the company sits right now in the tech world. With a focused target in mind, JDA no longer feels the need to generate all the innovation required to bring its goals to life. Its newfound willingness to work and play well with one-time competitors may be the very thing that allows it to incorporate innovations from both below and above its current place in the industry. And that’s the very thing – as confirmed by the show’s guest speaker, astronaut Scott Kelly – that makes moonshots even remotely possible.