Brandon Daniels on AI and Supply Chain Risk at Davos 2026

Yeah, thank you for having me, Dan.

Yeah. So I mean, probably the most important thing to know about Exiger is we develop advanced artificial intelligence solutions and we've been doing so for the last decade. Exiger's focus though is to point those advanced AI solutions against issues in the supply chain because at the end of the day supply chains they win wars. They drive and empower AI. Without the advanced supply chains that we're helping our customers to build, you couldn't build out data centers. They help to differentiate and to find alternatives for energy and they help us to sort of deal with some of the longer term challenges we have around critical minerals and new materials and raw material stores that are going to be necessary and the sort of circular nature of how we can start to use these things and reuse these things effectively to take down some of the temperature around geoeconomic risk and some of the sort of state-based nationalism. I feel like supply chain was a very dull topic 10 years ago. Yeah. We went through the pandemic. We're like, 'Oh my god, this really matters.'

Yeah. So I mean first of all, our customers need to understand where risk is but risk is so pervasive right now. Whether it's natural disasters, man-made disasters, tariff regimes, whatever it might be, it's estimated that this year through August we've lost about $1.5 trillion due to supply chain disruptions. So when you put that in context, the ability to get to supply chain resilience takes on a new level of importance. Our customers are utilizing our capability to one ensure they're compliant, ensure they have visibility to their supply chains so they can deal with things like the pivots that they have to do on tariffs, but the second thing that they're doing is they're trying to get long-term resilience, because a lot of these issues aren't going to go away. The global power competition that's happening right now in AI and in energy is going to sustain for the next two decades and the winners are going to determine what the world looks like for the next hundred years. Our customers are starting to utilize our capabilities to pre-plan supply chains not five weeks out, not five months out, not five days out but five years out, starting to look at new ways to source materials, starting to look at new ways to use additive manufacturing, starting to look at new ways to work. At the underbelly of a lot of our supply chains is a lot of nasty stuff: serious environmental issues, serious societal and ethical issues, serious problems of overconcentration of resources in certain regions where we need to have a distributed and more competitive market. Our customers are utilizing the technology to basically first understand what their supply chains look like. Most people think a company has all of the information to manage their supply chain at their fingertips, but the fact is that most automotive brands, 95% of the cost of manufacturing a car are the goods and services that they buy from outside their organization. That stuff doesn't get made on their manufacturing floor. That stuff isn't in their ERP. They don't own those sites. So first, we give them visibility to the rest of the world that they don't own, they don't manage. We give them the site capacity of their vendors. We give them the parts, the materials, the components that they rely on, where those things come from. Help them to design, redesign those supply chains. The second thing that they do with that visibility is they start to understand where there are critical nodes and dependencies. Most people think supply chains start here at the top like I buy this microelectronic and then they grow and grow into this big pyramid of a supply chain. They actually don't work like that. They are actually diamonds. When I've got a microelectronic up here, when I get past the fat middle of manufacturers and distributors and advanced packagers, I start to winnow down to like one company in the world that makes that photolithography equipment or the one company in the world that produces high purity quartz or the 12 companies in the world that actually have the capability to create high purity quartz crucibles that grow the silicon ingots that we slice into wafers. So the second thing we do is we help them to find those critical nodes and then to actually monitor them for risk as well. It's understanding dependency, understanding the market, understanding where their margin levels aren't going to be able to bear being able to continue to produce if those things get disrupted. And then finally, it's utilizing it for compliance purposes. There have been a bunch of multi-tier supply chain sanctions and export control requirements that have been imposed in the last just couple of years. Actually since the pandemic, they've skyrocketed. Things like the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in the United States, things like CSDDD here in Europe. Our customers utilize our technology to find those issues. But then I have to contextualize it. I have to say, okay, of all of these risks that could potentially hit me, what parts, what components are both highly critical and have high risk of availability or disruption? So basically, what are the most available products and what are the most critical products and the ones that have the least availability and the highest criticality, that's where you need to spend your time. The way that I like to talk about it is we take all those risks and we cipher it down to what's contextually important for your organization and that is what allowed our customers to be adaptable to this everchanging environment and this literally exponential explosion of risk around them.

Absolutely. So we've been building out forced labor diagnostics across multiple supply chains and that comes in a couple forms. One is actually doing the on the ground research using partners to identify where we can find confirmed forced labor transfers, forced labor use, abuse of labor practices. Finding those companies, those entities, those state-sponsored programs that are inherently creating this bedrock of forced labor. We right now think there are about 50 million people that are in bondage today, that are in modern slavery. That number explodes if you start to look at the spectrum of potential forced labor. The other thing is we recognize that forced labor is kind of like one of those risks that runs in packs. It's usually concomitant with environmental issues. So the least regulated industries in the least regulated countries also are putting their employees in contact with really bad and hazardous chemicals, pollutants, severe waste. So what we see is a risk matrix where these industries that have a lot of problematic byproducts are also in concert with forced labor. So we start with finding that universe and then we identify those sectors that heavily use that universe. Pharmaceuticals, especially our generic pharmaceuticals, the KSMs and the APIs are often produced by forced labor. 10% of the API production facilities in China are what are called shadow facilities. They have no regulation, no FDA oversight, and are actually producing a lot of large-scale APIs that go into your and my pharmaceuticals every day. There is a pervasive industry where people are walking on dirty floors in pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities and chemical manufacturing facilities. If there's a contaminant, it hurts them and it hurts us. So forced labor has downstream impacts. We map it up into the industries and we see chemicals as a major issue. We see that really hard end stage of steel alloy manufacturing as a really nasty place. It used to be sort of the noble gas creation was a significant one. And then stuff that all of us use: the critical minerals necessary for our cell phones, the production of solar panels, the production of silicon chips. All of these industries have core forced labor. So what we do is we say, okay, if you need those things upstream to manufacture, to print, to run through a special process, you're utilizing that forced labor. So what we've done is we've taken a subset of all of that mapping that we've done all the way into the very heavily regulated visible industries with companies that are here at Davos today utilizing them. We've mapped those all the way up and we've released our first segment of our AI created data for free so that everyone can start taking seriously the need to map their supply chains and have ownership of the ethical issues at the base. We're going to continuously do this. We've worked with Hope for Justice, Slave Free Alliance, the Anti-Slavery Collective, many other major nonprofits. We've worked with Dr. Laura Murphy, who's a preeminent academic on specifically Uyghur Forced Labor and China Forced Labor to build out this data set. And we've decided to release it for free to anyone that's willing to come in and try to make a difference.

Um so I think that there will be a prioritization of the critical materials, minerals, the raw assets that we require. I think that there's going to be a prioritization of those raw assets and then once we determine which of them are absolutely critical to certain industries that are related to our international competitiveness. I think each country will say, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure I have sufficient store locally and diversified with allies to offset what might be adversarial or unaligned interests. I think that prioritization is going to be industry focused, focused on the places where automation can actually bring back manufacturing to any nation, whether emerging or not. It can bring back the ability to create locally, it still increases GDP. So the thing that I see happening is that prioritization and then you're going to see specialization. That specialization will mean that countries like North or South Korea will be partnering with the United States to focus on shipbuilding because they've just got such strong capacity there. I think that sort of global ally base of economic collaboration can expand to everywhere. I mean, you've seen the White House's decision to allow some of our AI chips to be sold into China, some of the most advanced Nvidia chips. I think that kind of activity can happen and can grow and we can get back to free and fair and transparent global markets. But I think the last word that I said, transparency, is really the big challenge to doing that effectively. You want to make sure that that chip doesn't end up in a missile, right? So that's where you're going to have the break. You're going to have the break on priorities. Where do countries think they can be competitive? Where they don't think they can be competitive. You're going to have alliances of specialization. And then the second thing is you're going to have the hard lines around national security. And in order to maintain a global market, you really do need independent bodies to help provide transparency like we've got in aeronautics, like we've got in space, like we've got in AIS. We've got lots of areas where we have a lot of very visible tracking that happens even on shadow fleets and it is a check and balance to the ability to say I'm going to open all of the waters.

I think it's critically important. I agree.

Thank you.