AI is making businesses move faster. But faster doesn’t always mean better. The real advantage is using technology to help people make better decisions, faster and with greater confidence.
That’s what I see happening in global commerce right now.
Every day, millions of decisions determine whether a production line keeps running, a store shelf stays stocked, or a critical shipment arrives where it needs to be. Tariffs change, a port closes, or capacity disappears. Or maybe a customer suddenly needs to move twice the freight in half the time. Those aren’t technology problems. They’re business problems. And solving them still requires human judgment.
Managing 37 million shipments a year, we see complexity at a scale that provides a unique perspective on the high-stakes, high-consequences environment businesses operate in. At that scale, data becomes an advantage when combined with our unique context, expertise, and network. Trained on hundreds of trillions of proprietary data points, our AI benefits from a level of operational context that’s hard to replicate, enabling our teams to help customers anticipate, orchestrate, and optimize outcomes across increasingly complex supply chains. We’ve learned that how data is applied to solve real-world problems is what separates market leaders from everyone else.
Supply chains run smoothly when a series of interconnected decisions go to plan. When they don’t, there’s a global network of people working tirelessly to get things back on track. People who know every minute detail about their customer’s business: from what day of the week orders come in, to what a two-hour delay on a critical shipment means for a patient waiting for care.
Now give that workforce the technology to predict problems instead of reacting after the fact. What if they could evaluate millions of data points in seconds and surface recommendations that saved customers time and money? And what if this technology could change their job for the better?
The value of AI is simple: help our people solve customer problems better and faster. That’s not technology replacing human judgment. It’s how we achieve better outcomes when technology, context, and human expertise work together.
You can’t transform a business by layering new technology into old ways of working. It requires redesigning the work from the ground up, leveraging AI for what technology does best, and people for what only humans can do. AI excels at automating repetitive operational tasks. Our people excel at building trusted partnerships. Partnerships where trust is earned one interaction at a time. An email back and forth. A phone call to discuss a new opportunity. Every interaction builds the foundation for how our teams respond to challenges. When human expertise is amplified by AI, customers gain a partner that can anticipate needs, navigate complexity, and create value at a scale never before possible.
In global logistics, you can’t build and train AI agents to manage a generic shipment, because there’s no such thing. Every customer, every shipment, and every decision has its own priorities and expectations. When humans and technology work as partners, that’s where the unlock happens. AI gives our teams the ability to see around corners. They can evaluate impending severe weather, shifting capacity, and network risks in moments, then focus their expertise where it matters most: helping customers create resilient supply chains.
Our people help move the goods that move the world. It’s because of the work we do that consumers can complete simple tasks, like going to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. They arrive assuming their medication is available for purchase, without once thinking about whether the shipment was successfully delivered on time. Just as our customers trust us to keep shelves stocked, deliver disaster relief, and keep critical operations running.
AI will accelerate global commerce. That’s a fact. But the companies that lead in this transformative moment won’t be the ones with the most sophisticated technology alone. They’ll be the ones that use AI to make human expertise more powerful. The ones that best combine technology, context, and human expertise to shape outcomes rather than simply react to them. The ones who make that their competitive advantage.
From my vantage point, we’re only beginning to unlock the immense value when humans and AI work together as partners. Our early results prove this is the winning formula. It’s humans working with AI that’s delivering outcomes that couldn’t be achieved without the other. The real promise of AI isn’t artificial intelligence. It’s amplified human potential.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
