AI should be used to strengthen human expertise rather than replace judgement in global logistics, Dave Bozeman has argued, as businesses face increasingly complex supply-chain decisions.
Bozeman said technology could help teams assess risks more quickly and make better-informed decisions, but warned that speed alone did not guarantee better results. Tariff changes, port closures, disappearing capacity and urgent changes in customer demand remained business challenges requiring human judgement.
The operation he described manages 37 million shipments a year, providing a view of the pressures facing global commerce. He said hundreds of trillions of proprietary data points could give artificial intelligence the operational context needed to help teams anticipate, organise and improve supply-chain outcomes.
That data was most valuable when combined with knowledge of individual customers and the wider logistics network, he said. Every shipment has different priorities, making it impossible to build a system around a single standard model of freight.
Bozeman said AI could analyse millions of data points in seconds, identify potential problems and recommend ways to save time and money. This would allow staff to focus on understanding customers’ businesses and addressing the consequences of disruption.
He argued that companies would not achieve meaningful transformation simply by adding new technology to existing processes. Instead, work needed to be redesigned so that AI handled repetitive operational tasks while people concentrated on relationships, judgement and complex decisions.
In practice, logistics teams could use the technology to assess severe weather, changes in available capacity and other network risks before they caused disruption. Human specialists could then use those insights to help customers build more resilient supply chains.
The consequences of that work can extend beyond commercial operations, affecting whether shops remain stocked, disaster relief reaches its destination and essential medicines arrive at pharmacies on time. Customers may never see the decisions involved in making those deliveries, but depend on them being made successfully.
Bozeman said the organisations most likely to lead as AI develops would not necessarily be those with the most advanced technology alone. Their advantage would come from combining technology, operational context and human expertise to shape outcomes rather than simply respond to problems.
He described the partnership between people and AI as the central opportunity, saying early results showed that each could deliver outcomes unavailable to the other working alone. The ultimate value of the technology, he argued, lies in expanding what people are able to achieve.
