Today, FourKites announced one of the most consequential product releases in our decade-long history of leadership and innovation: the FourKites® Intelligent Control Tower™.
You can read our official announcement here, but to sum up why it matters, today we leapfrogged yesterday’s backward-looking planning and reporting control tower products with the launch of an intelligent system — powered by a digital workforce of AI agents and leveraging our world-leading real-time network of supply chain data — that can surface insights, assess risk, make prescriptive recommendations, and act autonomously across many complex supply chain use cases.
For a supply chain industry that is urgently striving to realize more value from its technology investments and supply chain data, this is a paradigm shift.
And for FourKites, it represents the latest in a long history of market disruptions and innovations. Just a little more than ten years after we pioneered real-time transportation visibility, today we are upending the control tower category with cutting-edge technologies purpose-built to address the use cases that supply chain stakeholders care about most.
As this major platform release was coming together, many employees, customers and industry influencers asked me some common questions. Is this a major pivot in FourKites’ vision and mission? Why now?
FourKites’ vision and mission are unchanged. Since day one, we envisioned a new era of automated, interconnected and collaborative global supply chains, powered and optimized by real-time supply chain data and advanced technologies, including AI, that help the world’s global brands overcome their most pressing supply chain challenges. It’s the same North Star.
As to the second question, let’s first take a step back and look at the state of the supply chain industry today.
Despite a decade of massive innovations and new supply chain solutions flooding the market, the reality is that many of the industry’s major issues remain entrenched. The market is still fragmented. So are the technologies and systems. The typical enterprise in the supply chain is a collection of silos. The logistics systems don’t talk to the warehousing systems. The warehousing systems don’t talk to the customer service systems. The customer service systems don’t talk to the customers themselves.
Fragmentation leads to siloed processes and siloed behaviors across functions. Inefficiencies. Disruptions mismanaged and opportunities missed. It leads to fragmented and disappointing experiences for customers all along the chain.
To realize our founding vision, we knew the silos had to come down. Our early thinking was that the legacy systems providers — ERP, TMS, WMS, you-name-it — would consume our data and operationalize it to drive business value.
But it hasn’t worked out that way. For many reasons, legacy systems struggle when it comes to real-time data. They were designed for batch processing, not real-time. They rely on relational databases that aren’t built for unstructured data. Worse, upwards of 90% of legacy systems’ install base is on-prem — which massively constrains their ability to integrate with and process large volumes of real-time data.
This list goes on, but the bottom line? Legacy systems have lagged behind. Now they may be left behind for good.
With the launch of FourKites’ Intelligent Control Tower, we are no longer depending on legacy systems to consume and operationalize FourKites data. We are reversing it. Now, we are consuming data from legacy systems and building workflows to make that data more actionable across different functions. Essentially, FourKites is now taking the lead on breaking down the silos.
Second — and this is really the heart of why now — with the sudden advent of AI agents and agentic workflows, we are empowering and enabling companies to take autonomous, AI-driven actions without throwing more headcount at these problems. We’ve pioneered a system of agents tailor-made for the most common supply chain use cases across procurement, supplier management, inventory, facilities, customer service and more.
Ultimately, this was born out of necessity. We waited 10 years thinking legacy players would catch up. They haven’t. Then, GenAI and agents arrived on the scene as incredible force multipliers for getting value out of quality data.
Speaking of quality data. The FourKites network is the world’s most comprehensive source of real-time supply chain data, tracking over 3.2 million shipments daily, reaching 200+ countries and territories across road, rail, ocean and air, and including over 1.1 million carriers and 98% of the world’s ocean traffic. No one else comes close.
We also have under our belt a decade of category-leading innovation, from our patented ETA and transit time algorithms to our recommendation engine and more. There’s a lot of IP that we have built over the last 10 years that makes our data more unique, more granular and more accurate — giving us an edge when it comes to agentic workflows.
And we have a community like no other. We’ve spent 10 years, not just supporting Fortune 2000 companies end-to-end across their key supply chain workflows, but innovating alongside them. We are getting feedback from thousands of customers on a daily basis on what needs to be built. We have feedback mechanisms within the product asking what we can do better. We host regular customer council calls and innovation workshops and customer roundtables throughout the year. As a result, we understand customer issues and customer supply chain workflows like few others.
Taken all together — our network, our IP, our intimate collaboration with the world’s leading brands, the force multiplier of AI — and we arrive at the next major milestone in realizing our founding vision: the Intelligent Control Tower. When it comes to impact and customer value, the best is ahead.
