Paul D’Arrigo

Special Guest Blog Post from Amazon Freight   For supply chains across the globe, goods in motion are promises in motion. When a palletised shipment is delayed or goes dark, the impact is felt not just in transport teams, but in customer service, inventory planning, and broader network performance. In a conversation, economist Dr. Rebecca Harding and Chris Roe, Managing Director of Amazon Freight, explored how technology and collaboration are changing the way freight networks operate. While their primary focus was freight, their insights map directly onto the resilience challenges supply chain leaders face every day.   Old pressures, new data In a study supported by Amazon Freight, every shipper surveyed agreed that technology is crucial to the freight industry’s resilience. While this isn’t a surprise, it’s an important reminder of the role that technology plays. Roe shared a key example where Amazon Freight connected a customer’s system to its own system. Visibility on the end-to-end movement went from essentially zero to a high level of coverage. Instead of discovering problems only when a shipment failed to arrive, the customer could now see disruptions as they emerged and act earlier. For supply chain teams, that move from partial, delayed information…

Special Guest Blog Post written by Deborah Dull   Imagine it’s launch season in your supply chain, and a team of AI agents is hard at work: coordinating shipments with suppliers, allocating inventory, and handling a missed delivery. It’s hard to go a day without hearing about the latest AI headlines: new LLMs, new applications, new use cases. These discussions are part of my every day. Business leaders and IT teams are eager to explore – and they have a lot of questions… and apprehension. In these discussions, we have found one framework that lands consistently: consider AI agents like new hires, not new software.   Step 1: Hire Like You Mean It Just like hiring humans, this step is about defining what you need. The first decision is the purpose of the role: what problems are you trying to solve? Where are your people overwhelmed? Where is your business growing in coming months? From here, the next decision is to build the business case just like you would for a new headcount. For example, consider the ROI of having a digital employee who can process supplier performance data 24/7. Now, decide on the type of agent that will join…