Events Technology Companies

Sysco Wins Newsweek’s 2026 AI Impact Award for AI Brand & Retail Excellence

Sysco Corporation (NYSE:SYY), the global leader in food distribution, has been awarded a 2026 Newsweek AI Impact Award for an innovative enterprise-wide AI application that enhances supply chain processes, drives sales productivity and elevates the customer e-commerce experience.

Sysco is being recognized in the AI Brand & Retail – Best Outcomes category for creating and scaling the Sysco Agentic Ecosystem (SAGE), a company-wide AI capability designed to help move AI from experimentation into everyday business operations across sales, supply chain, customer experience and back-office functions.

“SAGE represents a major step forward in responsible AI operationalization across a complex, global enterprise,” said Sysco Interim Chief Information and Digital Officer Navin Advani. “By embedding AI directly into workflows – from sales enablement and customer engagement to supply chain planning, inventory optimization, and back-office functions– we are transforming AI from a set of tools into a durable operating capability.”

Recognition from Newsweek

Newsweek’s AI Impact Awards recognize organizations that demonstrate measurable, real‑world impact from artificial intelligence, honoring innovations that go beyond experimentation to drive lasting operational and business value.

This recognition underscores Sysco’s leadership in applying AI responsibly to solve complex retail and supply chain challenges at enterprise scale—setting a benchmark for how agentic AI can be operationalized across industries.

Speaking on the recognition, Thushera Kawdawatta - Managing Director, Sysco LABS Sri Lanka said, “Receiving Newsweek’s 2026 AI Impact Award for AI Brand & Retail Excellence is a tremendous milestone for the entire Sysco ecosystem. We are incredibly proud of our teams at Sysco LABS in Sri Lanka, who have been instrumental in engineering SAGE. By developing these enterprise-grade capabilities, we are doing more than just advancing digital transformation, we are empowering our people with the intelligence to do higher-value, high-impact work.

This global recognition, alongside our recent wins at the Presidential Export Awards and SLASSCOM National Ingenuity Awards proves that the world-class innovation originating from Colombo is actively shaping the future of our business on a global scale.”

Delivering Measurable Outcomes Across Retail and Supply Chain

SAGE helps teams across Sysco automate workflows, surface insights faster and improve decision-making with AI-enabled capabilities supported by human oversight. This architecture supports a broad range of business‑critical use cases, including:

· E-commerce and sales enablement, powering more personalized digital experiences, smarter product discovery through Sysco Shop while enabling our sales consultants with Next Best Actions (NBAs)

· Supply chain optimization, helping teams improve forecasting, inventory decisions, product flow and service reliability

· Prediction and forecasting, using real‑time signals to help teams respond more proactively to changing customer demand and operational conditions

Within months of deployment, SAGE is being scaled from pilots to production, powering multiple live agentic solutions and supporting millions of business interactions across Sysco’s enterprise.

Built for Scale, Governance, and the Future of AI

SAGE is the connective intelligence layer unifying external capabilities and models, with Sysco’s internal data and systems to build AI-powered workflows across Sysco’s businesses. Unlike traditional AI platforms, SAGE is model-agnostic and can run on any cloud infrastructure. This design allows Sysco to adopt new AI technologies while maintaining strong security, compliance and human-in-the-loop controls.

By standardizing the development, governance and deployment of agents, SAGE enables Sysco to rapidly scale AI solutions to drive faster time to value across Sysco businesses.