Last Mile Delivery Conference and Expo 2026: What I Took Home from Toronto

By Dibakar Ghosh

The Last Mile Delivery Conference & Expo wrapped up in Toronto last week. On day one I sent a joking note back to my team: “I run on coffee and a little chocolate.” But don’t underestimate a good cup of coffee, it gets me into the conversation.

What I love about this industry is how willing people are to talk honestly. One theme kept coming up over the two days; supply chain resilience is a constant work-in-progress. The teams who handle disruption well aren’t running on smarter systems than everyone else. They’ve spent the time thinking about what happens when something goes wrong.

The research backs up what I kept hearing in person.

• Disruptions aren’t rare anymore; they’re a regular event. McKinsey found that supply chain disruptions lasting a month or longer now happen about every 3.7 years on average, and over a decade they cost the typical company close to half a year’s profits. (McKinsey, 2020)
• Most teams are stuck putting out fires. Gartner found 44% of supply chain leaders spend their time reacting to medium and high-impact disruptions, and more than a third of supply chain teams spend at least 30% of their time firefighting. (Gartner, 2024)
• Your supply chain runs through partners, not you. KPMG found 43% of organizations have limited or no visibility into their direct suppliers. The fix isn’t a bigger system with a fancier dashboard. It’s making sure the data moving between you and your partners is clean, fast, and flagging problems early. (KPMG, 2024)

The Panels I’m Still Thinking About

“Supply Chain Shocks: How to Manage and Build Resilience.”

This was one of the best sessions I sat in on. Maria Gil Molina (Director of Global Operations & Supply Chain), Caroline Croft, Andaleeb Syed Dobson, and Michael Barsoum (Global Director of Production and Purchasing at Joseph Ribkoff) each talked about the curveballs their companies have been dealing with lately and how they’re getting through them. One line I wrote down and underlined: “Resilience isn’t a safety net anymore, it’s the strategy.”

Michael’s point about strong partnerships being the best defense against uncertainty matched what I’d been hearing in the side conversations all day.

“From Forecast to Front Door: Building a Reliable, Brand-Safe Last Mile in Canada”

This panel covered some of the same ground from a different angle. Sakshi Gupta, MBA, CSCP (Pet Valu), Vignesh Vishwanathan (Senior Director, CS&L / E2E Planning at Mondelēz Canada), and Francisco Calderon, moderated by Jesse Lyddiatt, got into the mechanics of how last-mile performance happens. Their point: getting orders to customers on time and complete only happens when the forecasting team, the network planners, the inventory team, and logistics are all talking to each other. No single department can pull it off alone. Vignesh said service is what actually sets you apart from your competitors. It’s easy to say, much harder to build, and the panel was honest about that gap.

“From Reactive to Predictive: The Technology Driving Last-Mile Performance”

This discusssion got into the data layer. Arya Bhavsar, PMP, M.Eng and Tony Valayil Raju were both on it. Tony also ran a separate breakout on Small Language Models (SLMs) in last-mile analytics, which I found especially useful.

SLMs are smaller, more focused on AI models. They don’t get the same attention as the big names like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, but for a lot of everyday logistics questions you don’t need the biggest model on the market, and the cost savings add up. The takeaway from both sessions was the same: stop writing up problems after they’ve already happened and start catching them while there’s still time to do something about it.

Vladislav Gorea, PGDip led a session about a question a lot of companies are wrestling with right now: “Do I keep owning my delivery trucks, or do I hand off that work to an outside company that specializes in it?”

There’s also a push for trucking companies to switch over to electric vehicles. While they’re environmentally friendly, making the switch can be expensive and complicated. There’s no definitive answer right now, but it’s something companies in the industry are grappling with.

What I’m Taking Away

If I had to boil two days of conversations down to one thing, it’s this: the teams who handle disruption well aren’t the ones with the biggest systems or the deepest pockets. They’re the ones who’ve done the quiet, unglamorous work of making sure their information is clean; their partners are connected, and their data is telling them what’s happening before it becomes a problem.

That’s exactly the work FSI does. Our custom supplier portals, document automation, and network VAN services are built to keep that information layer humming, so the teams using it can spend less time firefighting and more time actually running their business. I came home from Toronto with a full notebook, a lot of new connections, and a renewed appreciation for the people doing this work. The future of last mile is being built by the folks who refuse to wait for the next crisis to start preparing. I’m looking forward to seeing what they build next.