IN Brief:
- FedEx surveyed 700 senior leaders, flagging a gap between shipment tracking and intervention.
- 97% say visibility alone is insufficient, while only 18% say teams can always intervene on delays.
- The report points to connected systems, analytics, and AI to support earlier disruption detection and faster response.
FedEx has released its first Future of Logistics Intelligence Report, setting out how supply chain organisations are struggling to convert tracking data into timely decisions when shipments slip. The report frames “logistics intelligence” as the step beyond visibility — using connected data, analytics, and AI to predict disruption, recommend actions, and reduce the latency between an exception occurring and a team intervening effectively.
“Many organisations can see what’s happening in their supply chains, but leaders in the space can predict and act fast enough when it matters most,” said Jason Brenner, senior vice president, digital portfolio at FedEx. “Closing the gap with logistics intelligence, supported by analytics, AI and close partnerships with your carrier, will help organisations move from reacting to disruptions to anticipating them, minimising impact and delivering a leading customer experience.”
The report’s headline statistic reveals that 97% of leaders say visibility alone is no longer enough to stay ahead. Yet the operational follow-through remains mixed. FedEx found 59% of organisations use data proactively to predict and prevent issues, while 25% use it reactively and 11% use it primarily to understand current issues. Only 18% say their teams are always able to intervene when shipments are delayed, suggesting that exception management is still constrained by process design, decision rights, and tool fragmentation as much as by the quality of tracking data.
FedEx’s report also links intelligence gaps to the customer-facing end of the chain. Decision-makers cited reliable delivery windows (36%) and end-to-end shipment tracking (34%) as top consumer priorities, with limited visibility and delivery delays still the most common shipping complaints. The cost of poor execution is not limited to freight spend: leaders pointed to higher costs to serve (53%), increased strain on service teams (47%), and more customer complaints (46%) as consequences of delays.
A recurring theme is system sprawl. FedEx reports that 66% of teams use three or more systems to manage shipments, while only 4% rely on a single system. In practice, that creates swivel-chair workflows, manual reconciliation, and a higher risk of missed signals as data crosses organisational and platform boundaries.
On future readiness, only 43% of leaders strongly agree their logistics systems are “future-proof” — able to adapt to shifting delivery expectations, compliance demands, and market conditions. FedEx is positioning analytics and AI as the mechanism for earlier disruption detection, reduced manual work, and faster, more confident interventions, but the report’s data points to a more basic issue: many organisations have the raw visibility, yet lack the integrated workflow and authority model to act on it at speed.
The full report is available here.
