AI in supply chain is generating a lot of noise right now. This is the fourth or fifth time in my career that someone's told me an incoming technology is going to replace everybody. Whether it was SaaS and the cloud or the shift from mainframe to distributed computing, the prediction was always the same. And every single time, huge advancements in productivity happened. People weren't eliminated. They were redirected. I don't see any mechanism by which that pattern breaks with AI.
Why Logistics Is Harder to Automate Than People Think
When you think about AI for examining legal cases, there's a finite group of materials. They're generally formatted in a similar way and use similar language. Logistics is a completely different environment. No two carriers describe things the same way. The information doesn't come in consistently. And it rarely matches up with anything you anticipated from a TMS. That makes the AI problem in logistics a lot harder to crack. Not impossible. We're in production with a lot of things at Trax right now. But the complexity that sits in front of logistics leaders is real.
What AI Actually Changes for Logistics Leaders
If you're a logistics leader, job number one is getting objects from A to B. That's how you generate revenue and margin. If you get in the way of that, you're probably out of a job. So the first application of AI is eliminating the things that distract you from that core function. The second is surfacing insights that help you do it more effectively. Go look at where you have the most data and apply AI there. What carriers provide this service the fastest and cheapest? Which ones are the most compliant with their contracts?
I've got over 10 years of ambitions and opportunities sitting in front of me at Trax. What I'm hoping is that AI compresses that timeline into two and a half to three years. Will the day-to-day mundane work go away? Yes. But the more strategic activity leaders always intended for their teams will actually become available. I think this is the first time where that's really going to happen at scale.
How AI Helps You Respond to the Business
The number of carriers you need to manage to have a truly dynamic logistics environment is significant. Today, that's very difficult to manage at scale. How do you go from 100 to 500 carriers without adding headcount or overhead? That's the kind of problem AI can solve for and it's the kind of conversation we're having with logistics leaders right now.
As the business changes, you can actually respond. If leadership says we need to cut costs, you can point to where you can take out $45 million and show the data behind it. If the priority shifts to speed because you've got a hot product, you already know the carriers that can move things quickly and reliably. If rejection rates climb, you know who can cover the freight. That ability to dynamically respond to the business is what AI unlocks for logistics teams.
People Are Not Going Away
I'd hesitate to say tons of people are going away from the logistics work stream in the next couple of years. What we're going to see is huge advancements and many people becoming retrained. New people are going to show up with different skill sets. But I don't see a world where we get rid of everybody. We saw a bit of this with robotic process automation a few years back. There were huge productivity leaps and people were actually able to go focus on higher value work. The same thing is going to happen here. The work changes. The people remain.
Where Logistics Leaders Should Focus Next
If you're a logistics leader evaluating AI right now, start with where you have the most structured data. Apply AI there first. Look at your carrier data and contract compliance. Look at where you're spending the most time on repetitive decisions.
Interested in how Trax helps logistics leaders apply AI across their supply chains? Explore our resources or connect with our team to start the conversation.