Logistically Speaking…What’s real and what’s vaporware in supply chain technology?

If supply chain technology startups, flame-outs and trending topics were a bingo card or a drinking game, the only question is which would come first: the card being filled or the player blacking out. An industry that for the longest time was late to the party on innovation now finds itself at the center of an influx of investment and innovation for technologies seeking to bring efficiency, transparency, traceability, decision-making, enhanced prognostication, and sustainability.

In the 2024 version of Gartner’s Annual Supply Chain report, they listed nine top trends for this year and the near future:

  • Cyber Extortion

  • Supply Chain Data Governance

  • End-to-end sustainable supply chains

  • AI-Enabled Vision Systems

  • Augmented-Connected Workforce

  • Composite AI

  • Next-Generation Humanoid Working Robots

  • Machine Customers

Cyber Extortion is certainly one that is in the news, both on the non-asset service provider side as well as on the asset-owning side. Given the news this week as well of discovery of a major vulnerability in the cockpit and crew access systems, the persistent checking for vulnerabilities is with good cause. 

Ask anybody in logistics older than Gen Z, and they’ll tell you that the biggest bifurcation in logic was the time and money spent on client-facing tools and visibility and the paucity of investment to make your own platform(s) both operate efficiently and have interoperability with others.

But why did this happen? The argument could be made that two key developments moved the industry from stasis and status quo to innovation. 

The first was the ability to move away from the “all under one roof” approach to technology that large forwarders used to their advantage because they had budgets, programmers and IT infrastructure to build and operate their own environments. The second, was the advent of the API and the ability for people to deploy multiple best-in-class solutions instead of having to live in that single environment.

Those two items were already playing out when private equity money got into the game and the pandemic struck and changed how the world – and governments – saw and treated logistics.

Today, there are two kinds of technology companies. There’s either the de facto category goliath, or a constellation of competitors engaged in a Darwinian battle of life-or-death to become their category’s goliath. But for many of those companies, are they fighting with the exit and investor payoff in mind without necessarily solving the problem they were created and funded to address?

It is with this in mind that we decided that Eric Johnson, Senior Editor, Technology, for the Journal of Commerce, would be the best person to ask for his opinions. Eric has interviewed founders, pored over financial reports, sat through more pitches and demos than any human being should be forced to endure in their lifetime and presided over multiple in-person and online panels and forums covering just this topic.

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