Abbi Failla serves as chief administrative officer and chief of staff to the CEO at EASE Logistics, supporting day-to-day priorities, leading key projects, and ensuring the leadership team stays aligned and on track. On any given day, that can mean managing employee relations, overseeing policy implementation and benefits administration, tracking commissions, handling financial reporting and budget planning, or managing the build-out of EASE’s new headquarters.
She also owns the company’s 2026 strategy and goal planning process, working directly with leadership to set direction and keep execution on course.
Failla joined EASE Logistics in April 2021, where she founded the company's first Strategy and Innovation Department, establishing programs, systems and structure.
She also championed the integration of AMMI, EASE's proprietary platform that executes more than 40,000 AI-driven tasks per week, to ensure the workers running those workflows were prepared and comfortable.
Over the next four years, she steadily expanded her scope, from director of strategy and innovation to VP, business operations, then EVP, and most recently, her current role. Failla also serves as a founding board member and chairs the Workforce and Education Committee of the Ohio Supply Chain Academic Network (O-SCAN), designed to grow and diversify Ohio's supply chain talent pipeline through cross-sector collaboration between employers, educators, and workforce leaders.
She spent the first two decades of her career in human performance and business transformation across government, finance, insurance, healthcare, and automotive sectors, initially serving as event director for the State of Ohio Office of the Governor, and then at organizations such as Huntington National Bank, One10 Marketing, and Nationwide Insurance.
Failla was named the overall winner of the Workforce Innovator category for this year’s Women in Supply Chain Forum™ award, presented by Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive.
Marina Mayer, editor-in-chief of Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive and co-founder of the Women in Supply Chain Forum™, sat down with Failla to detail why championing human connection is important when training employees to embrace robotics.
Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive: When you joined EASE Logistics in April 2021, there was no official training program in place, which is why you founded the company's first Strategy and Innovation Department. What advice do you have for those in the audience on how to go about developing programs like this in their own companies?
Abbi Failla: When I joined EASE in 2021, we didn't have a formal training program, and honestly, I think that's true for a lot of growing companies. My advice is simple: start with the people, not a policy. Sit down with the folks actually doing the work and ask them where they feel unprepared. That's really how the strategy and innovation department started — it wasn't a big rollout, it was conversations.
Then build in phases. You don't need the whole program on day one. Pick the biggest gap, fix it, prove it works, and expand from there. And make sure leadership sees training as an investment, not a checkbox. Once that mindset shifts, the budget and the support follow.
Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive: You also championed the integration of AMMI, EASE's proprietary platform that executes more than 40,000 AI-driven tasks per week, to ensure the workers running those workflows were prepared and comfortable. What's the secret sauce?
Failla: I firmly believe the secret sauce is human communication. Talking to people before the technology shows up, not after. Any time we roll out something new, AMMI included, we bring the team in early and explain the why first. People aren't scared of automation. They're scared of being left out of the conversation about it.
So, we're really transparent about what AMMI actually does. It handles the repetitive, high-volume stuff so our people can spend their time on the judgment calls, the relationships, the things a machine can't do. And we invest in hands-on training so it feels like a tool they control, not something happening to them. Once people see that, adoption gets so much easier.
Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive: What inspired you to pursue a career in supply chain?
Failla: Honestly? I fell into the supply chain world, as it seems most of us do! I loved my job before EASE. I was an incentive program director planning international travel experiences for some of the biggest companies in the world. Then COVID hit, and international travel was the first industry shut down and the last to recover.
I had an absolute blast of a summer on furlough, but eventually I had to face reality. If we were going to be in a COVID world for years, I needed a plan B. At the time, all anyone could talk about was supply chain disruption, so I started digging into the industry. A former colleague of mine had already made the jump to EASE, and he helped set up a meeting with our CEO, Peter. The rest is history.
Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive: What supply chain trend do you think will have the biggest impact over the next five years?
Failla: I'd watch human-AI collaboration. We're past debating whether AI belongs in supply chain. The real question is how you bring it in without leaving your people behind. At EASE, that's exactly what we worked through with AMMI: using the technology to remove friction while keeping our people at the center of it. Companies that get that balance right are going to be the ones people want to work for. Companies who are not using and investing in AI and training their people to use it will get left behind. The gap will be significant.
Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive: What's a skill you've intentionally developed that has made the biggest difference in your career?
Failla: Learning HR from the ground up, honestly. I ended up leading HR at an enterprise level with zero formal HR background. I researched everything, took workshops and courses, leaned on our general gounsel when I needed to, and this year I finally earned my SHRM Senior Certified Professional (SHRM-SCP) credential.
But if I had to pick the habit underneath all of that, it's listening before deciding. Sitting with the people a decision affects before you make it. That's made the biggest difference for me, not just as an HR leader, but in every interaction I have.
Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive: If you could solve one supply chain challenge overnight, what would it be?
Failla: Diesel prices. (Kidding — mostly.)
In all seriousness, it would be workforce pathways. There are incredible careers in supply chain, and most people don't know they exist. Educators don't always know what to teach to prepare students for them. Most of us in this industry fell into it rather than chose it; so how do we build the next generation of people who go looking for these careers instead of stumbling into them? There's so much white space for creative, driven people to change how the world actually moves things. That's the gap I'd close overnight if I could.
