2018 has been a watershed moment in freight technology.
The market leaders confirmed they are “all-in” on tech, from Maersk to Kuehne + Nagel to potential entrants like Amazon. K+N as an example has had multiple new technology releases this year, significantly ahead of all previous years.
Logistics has been slower than most other large pillar global industries to embrace digital, and as a result the opportunities are more pronounced as well as being able to take advantage of recent software enhancements such as cloud and machine learning.
We believe one of the biggest areas of opportunity is client-facing software to empower all elements of the supply chain toward digital first transactions. This technology is available 24/7/365 on any internet-enabled device and promises to help speed up transactions while reducing their cost, and maybe even creating more transactions based on ease of use.
Client-facing technology will help the hundreds of thousands of freight forwarders “level up overnight” with well-funded new tech start-up players.
We believe today the most overhyped technology is Blockchain. It is right now a solution looking for a problem in logistics. As we are still early in the digital adoption for mainstream logistics, especially ocean freight, it will be years before Blockchain has found a strong mainstream use case. This is separate to the question if the technology itself even has the bandwidth to handle global freight transactions at any significant level.