As trade grows more complex, logistics leaders say the real test is turning early warnings into timely action.Global trade is expanding, but it is not getting easier to manage. The WTO’s October 2026 forecast expects merchandise trade volumes to grow 3.9 per cent this year, despite continuing geopolitical and transport disruption.
For companies juggling suppliers, carriers, forwarders and customs brokers, dashboards, emails and manual follow-ups are struggling to keep pace.Chitransh Sahai, Co-Founder and CEO of logistics technology firm GoComet, believes the answer lies in a change of emphasis. “The biggest shift happening in global supply chains is the move from visibility to control,” he says. “Knowing that a disruption is coming is important. Being able to act before it affects your business is what creates a competitive advantage.”AI can contribute in three ways, Sahai explains.
It can connect external risks, such as port congestion, strikes or carrier cancellations, to the shipments, purchase orders and customer commitments actually affected. It can draw on historical carrier performance and route conditions to flag delays earlier.
And it can help turn those insights into coordinated action.“The next competitive advantage in logistics won’t come from having more alerts,” he says. “It will come from turning intelligence into action before a disruption becomes a business problem.” How much can be handed over?Much of freight management is repetitive coordination: checking shipment status, comparing rates, chasing carriers, validating documents and reconciling invoices. Sahai says AI can already take on meaningful responsibility here, provided it has the right context, data and permissions. “We are entering a phase where enterprise software is moving beyond helping people manage work to increasingly carrying out the work itself,” he says.
GoComet’s Nova, an AI execution layer, follows this model. At a launch event in Singapore, the company demonstrated it processing an operational inbox, flagging a document discrepancy and progressing a booking with human approval.The limits, Sahai stresses, are deliberate. “The important distinction is between AI execution and human accountability.” Commercial strategy, critical rate negotiations, risk tolerance and decisions affecting customer commitments should stay with enterprises. “Humans decide.
AI executes within defined boundaries,” he says, adding that “it is not about making every process autonomous overnight.”Results and roadblocksCustomers report measurable gains. A global automotive lubricants manufacturer cited 5–6 per cent savings in monthly freight costs after moving quotation and evaluation onto GoComet’s platform, while a pharmaceutical supply-chain company reported 20–30 per cent better internal efficiency and roughly 5 per cent lower transport spending over a year.
These figures are company-reported and relate to GoComet’s established freight tools rather than Nova.Data gaps remain the most common obstacle, with critical information still arriving through emails, spreadsheets, PDFs and messaging apps. Yet Sahai argues firms need not wait for perfect systems. “One of the biggest misconceptions about AI adoption is that enterprises need perfectly connected systems before they can begin,” he says. “Global trade has never operated that way.”The harder problems lie elsewhere. “The biggest barriers to scaling AI are process fragmentation, inconsistent data quality and a lack of trust in automated decisions,” he says. “For AI to scale in global logistics, it must be capable enough to act and controlled enough to be trusted.”The India opportunityFor India, the stakes are significant.
Merchandise exports reached about $441.8 billion in FY 2025–26, according to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. “India has a tremendous opportunity to strengthen its position in global manufacturing and trade,” Sahai says. But competitiveness, he adds, is no longer only about capacity or quality. “It also depends on the ability to deliver reliably, respond to disruptions and keep logistics costs under control.”Over the next three to five years, he expects supply chains to become more predictive, software to shift from recording work to executing it, and “resilience will become a measurable business capability”.“I believe the future of logistics is not about eliminating human involvement,” Sahai says. “It is about making human involvement more valuable.”- Ends