“The swivelling must stop!” says Jonah McIntire, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Trimble, who argues that the supply chain needs a single, secure AI agent to rule them all.
There’s no question that our global supply chain is powered by data. Increasingly intelligent tech solutions pull, analyse and act on this massive amount of data from a multitude of sources.
For the past 40+ years, the transportation and logistics industry has settled into an inefficient status quo, struggling to sort through fragmented data with a swivel-chair workflow, hopping between sources. Today, in order to keep freight moving, a typical coordinator has to manually shift between scores of disconnected databases, legacy enterprise solutions and tracking platforms, wasting valuable time and mental capacity just shuffling through to find what they need.
This time can be utilised in a much more productive, fulfilling way. And the industry has come up with an initial solution that on the surface seems more efficient: an army of specialised AI micro-bots that can handle some of those manual, repetitive tasks.
While it’s clear that AI is the defining technology to transform the way it moves freight around the world, the current approach of creating isolated, separate AI tools for each individual task from manual order entries to negotiations needs to be evaluated and refined. Our co-ordinators’ chairs haven’t actually stopped swiveling between screens yet – they are ready for a more efficient approach.
What businesses need is a single AI agent that can help us swiftly and reliably navigate and make sense of this complex and chaotic ecosystem, managed securely from a single pane of glass, wiping out the swivel chair workflow once and for all…
Supercharging AI
Despite all that’s wrong with our current approach to AI tools, it’s easy to see how and why the industry has got to this point. In the internet’s early days, users were accustomed to having to track down information via curated web link directories. It was similar to the experience of using a phone book, or a reference library, clicking through a digital maze of subcategories to find what was needed.
Thankfully, this architecture has evolved significantly over the decades, but it isn’t all that different from the way businesses use AI agents today. Organisations are still required to identify the right agent for each task, provide the appropriate prompts and coordinate the next steps between systems. This approach remains inefficient.
A single, elite agent that brings a unified experience to users, owning the entire execution layer. Instead of a user needing to navigate all their disconnected tools, the agent can take the businesses’ natural-language directive and identify the right agent and data across a vast enterprise ecosystem to get the job done.
Single, safe agent
The true power of AI in logistics doesn’t come from a tool that can write emails, answer questions, or translate text. It comes from a system’s ability to act autonomously on high-stakes execution across multiple platforms and data sources, simultaneously.
One common supply chain task that would benefit from the true power of AI? The resolution of a single problematic shipment – typically requiring the extraction of account histories from a TMS, cross-referencing a Google Sheet for spot rates, pulling in web data for current market information and then documenting a new routing strategy within a fleet management software.
Many of these fragmented workflows extend beyond transport planning and into the yard, where disconnected systems, manual processes and poor visibility continue to create costly bottlenecks. Logistics Business recently explored this issue in depth with Gerry Daalhuisen, Senior Director at Transporeon, in the podcast Why the Yard is Still Logistics’ Biggest Blind Spot. The discussion examines why yards remain one of the least digitised parts of the supply chain, the hidden costs of outdated processes, and how greater visibility and orchestration can dramatically improve efficiency and safety. Listen to the episode here: Logistics Business Conversations Podcast
Right now, businesses can do this with a small fleet of AI agents but think of how much easier and faster this would be with a truly powerful agent that can execute this entire chain of commands across disparate platforms at the same time. This single, supercharged AI agent can move much faster than both human operators and traditional software, unlocking unprecedented efficiency. However, this efficiency comes with important security requirements that absolutely must be airtight.
Uncompromising security
An AI agent’s safety measures must scale with its operational velocity and access. For a unified agent to reach its full potential, it needs to be able to not only access, but also interact with, live business data and internal servers. In an environment like this, even a small lapse in security could create a corporate liability.
Currently, today’s most common consumer-grade AI tools are, at their very foundation, unfit for logistics. In the supply chain, logistics teams need solutions that come with comprehensive audit trails, granular user logging and strict cost controls. The last thing businesses want is a consumer-grade bot burning through thousands of dollars in token usage without accountability.
Wild spending isn’t the only threat. Primitive AI solutions that have lacked proper security oversight have been known to go on secretive “side quests” in an attempt to complete a task that they may have been blocked from due to security controls. These uncontrolled autonomous architectures have installed unauthorised software on host machines, creating new API connections and more in a bid to bypass security protocols in order to complete a task.
In a live operational context, this type of uncontrolled autonomy is unacceptable, presenting avoidable risks. True enterprise safety means enforcing boundaries that cannot be compromised. A powerful agent must operate under strict cost ceilings, complete visibility, explicit user-permission constraints and bulletproof data security.
Realising next-gen AI
The creation of a safe, unified AI structure is not just a promise of the hype cycle; it’s the inevitable future reality for the global transportation and logistics industry.
Because of the supply chain’s massive scale and low margins, shippers and fleets should not settle for consumer-facing solutions that need to catch up to the industry’s heavy-duty needs for complex and specialised tools.
By pairing top-of-the-line enterprise security with raw operational dominance in a single, next-generation AI agent, businesses can finally break down the fragmented workflows of the past to create a hyper-connected, high-velocity future for the global supply chain.
For more on Listen to our Logistics Business Conversations Podcast episode with Jonah here.
