What’s One Thing You Should Do Now to Ensure Your Company Is Still in Business in 5 Years?
We asked our audience: Name one thing you should be doing in 2026 or your company will likely be out of business in 5 years?
Get your data ready for AI agents. Today, they help command centers monitor cargo and react to issues. Soon, agents will oversee every shipment. Companies preparing their data now can gain a huge advantage, and those that don’t may not be around in five years.
-David Stanton
Co-founder and CEO
Reelables
Vet your carriers like your business depends on it, because it does. Don’t just rely on automated programs to do it. Freight fraud and scams are rising fast, and you’ll need real people using advanced technology to stop it.
-Mike Trudeau
Executive Vice President, Business Development
Montway Auto Transport
Reimagine the role of the sales rep. Customers expect speed, transparency, visibility, and outcomes; competition is no longer solely driven by price and capacity. Sales reps who remain reactionary instead of proving value to customers and proactively seeking new opportunities will struggle to compete.
-Zack Houghton
Director and Lead, Transportation & Logistics
Alexander Group
Go hybrid: local plus global fulfillment, with ROI-driven inventory placement. Fulfillment isn’t just operational; it shapes how customers experience your brand. Relying on one shipping lane is now a survival risk.
-William Yu
Founder and CEO
NextSmartShip
I have to list two: Clarify your purpose and invest in your talent. A world-class team working for a common purpose is uncommon and essential to compete.
-Scott Ashbaugh
CEO
DHL eCommerce Americas
Digitize or die. Every technology shift rewards early adopters and destroys those clinging to the past. In 2026, businesses need automated, end-to-end operations running on a single integrated platform, connecting everything from booking and routing to payments, accounting, and decision making. Manual processes and disconnected systems are quickly becoming extinction-level liabilities.
-Bryn Heimbeck
President and Co-Founder
Trade Tech
De-risk your supply chain by eliminating single points of failure across suppliers and vendor partners. Companies that diversify their sourcing and carrier strategies will be far better positioned to absorb disruption rather than react after the damage is done.
-Paul Brinkman
President
Trans-Solutions Consulting
Stop throwing human hours at repetitive supply chain tasks. Audit operations and integrate technology to get total performance visibility. This doesn’t mean blindly getting on the AI hype train; it requires calculated, strategic advancements. Companies stubbornly repeating the past five years of processes won’t survive the next five.
-Nick Rakovsky
CEO
DataDocks
Redesign your supply chain before the market does it for you. With 80%+ of supply chain cost locked in at design, and AI compressing design cycles from months to weeks, continuous network design is both possible and necessary.
-Kerry Rosenhagen
Expert Director and Supply Chain Design Practice Lead
EFESO Management Consultants
Focus ruthlessly on what you do best and let trusted partners and technology own everything else. The companies that survive the next five years won’t be the ones doing more. They’ll be the ones doing less, better. Companies spreading resources across too many priorities will struggle to compete.
-Will Schweda
SVP, Sales
Odyssey Logistics
Customer Service Tops the List
Take care of your customers. While there is absolutely a need for every business to innovate, to deploy artificial intelligence internally to drive efficient operations, and to remain vigilant on macro trends affecting their niche, in five years, being slow on any of these factors can be overcome by providing empathetic care and high-touch customer service.
-Markus Scott
CEO
EyeQ Monitoring
Drive purpose-driven innovation that delivers measurable customer value. Companies that use artificial intelligence to shorten implementation, accelerate time-to-value, and continuously adapt to customer needs will lead. Those that don’t, risk becoming irrelevant.
-Kristian “KO” O’Meara
Chief Commercial Officer
PairSoft
Embrace automation. Many warehouses still pick orders much as they did 20 years ago. The real question may not be how much automation to add, but whether your operations support speed, flexibility, resilience, and the ability to adapt to market changes.
-Akshay Jain
Director, Robotic Software Engineering
Symbotic
Compete on speed or don’t compete at all. AI has collapsed development timelines. Consumers expect dynamic routing, real-time visibility, and personalized delivery options. If you’re not innovating at that pace, you’ll be out of business in five years.
-Sean Wu
CEO
uShip
Combine AI adoption with workforce upskilling. AI is becoming essential for resilience, smarter decision-making, efficiency, and growth. Companies that invest in helping their people work effectively with AI will be the ones that stay competitive over the next five years.
-Andreas Podwojewski
Managing Director, North America
Arvato
Build a proprietary data layer now or you’re just running the same playbook as everyone else. The real differentiator isn’t the AI tool, it’s the data you feed it. Companies training models on third-party or historical data are working from the same inputs as competitors. IoT-generated data, unique to your operation, is what gives artificial intelligence an edge.
-Ilan Gluck
Head of Go-to-Market, North America
Digital Matter
Build a culture of continuous improvement. Implementing lean management principles builds a culture of continuous improvement where all employees are engaged. Kaizens, small incremental improvements submitted by associates and implemented over time, make impactful changes.
-Keith Ingels
Director of Lean Management
The Raymond Corporation
Treat packaging as a data asset, not as a cost line. EPR rules, ESG scorecards, and RFPs now demand provenance including recycled content, carbon impact, and chain of custody. If you can’t produce that, you won’t lose bids in 2028 or 2029 because your product is worse, you’ll lose them because you can’t stand behind it.
-Kyle Otting
CEO
Rebox Corp.
Stop thinking of your WMS as a warehouse system. Start thinking of it as an orchestration platform. Warehouses today are people, robots, AI agents, yard ops, and real-time data. If those are managed separately, your people become the integration layer. That’s expensive, slow, and impossible to scale. The winners won’t just have more AI. They’ll have a platform that ties all of it together.
–Michelle Jones
Director Solutions Consulting
Logistics Reply
If your business model depends on billing for time instead of outcomes, start reinventing it now. AI is compressing the value of labor while increasing the value of judgment, trust, and results. Price outcomes, not hours.
-Shannon Hynds
CEO
Quickcode
Going AI native in digital trade infrastructure and customs compliance solutions is the baseline. The rules keep shifting across jurisdictions and regulatory compliance complexity keeps multiplying. In 2026 we’re deepening that AI-powered capability into our solutions, because technology has to keep pace with regulations and the roadmap nimble.
-Siddharth, Priyesh
Head of Group Commercial
CrimsonLogic
Build supply chains that act, not just observe. When a supplier cancels an order, your network automatically identifies a backup supplier, reroutes the order, and confirms a new delivery window—in minutes. Within five years, businesses still running static sourcing models will struggle to absorb disruption, meet expectations and protect margins.
-Omar Qari
CEO
Logicbroker
Develop Adaptability
Invest in adaptability. Efficiency alone is no longer enough. In the years ahead, adaptability will be the true competitive advantage. The organizations that thrive will be those that can quickly adopt new technologies, respond to change, and evolve with customer demands.
-Jeff Jones
Senior Account Executive
Made4net
We’ve reached the end of the one-speed, one-channel-fits-all model. In 2026, retailers must optimize supply chain operations through the strategic use of automation and AI to support expanding channels and give consumers more control over when and how they receive goods.
-Ashfaque Chowdhury
CEO
Exol
Adaptability is key. Every lesson from labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, and market volatility points to the same conclusion: Companies need systems that let them pivot quickly when conditions change.
-Amy Dean
VP of Operations
SC Codeworks
The companies most likely to succeed over the next five years won’t have perfect forecasts, but what they will have is the ability to adapt. Transportation strategy can no longer be a once-a-year exercise. Leaders continuously reassess procurement, network design and transportation decisions as market conditions change, giving them the resilience to outperform in any market.
-Jenny Vander Zanden
Chief Operating Officer
Breakthrough
Develop a data foundation. If you’re still relying on paper inspections, spreadsheets, or delayed reports, you’re already behind. Companies need real-time visibility into product quality and a structured, digital data foundation. Without it, you can’t effectively leverage AI to optimize sourcing, identify risks, or improve supplier performance, putting your business at a growing competitive disadvantage.
-Robert Garrison
Enterprise Senior Director
TradeBeyond
Focus on orchestration. Supply chains have spent years investing in data, visibility, automation and AI. The next step is making it all work together. As networks become more complex, companies need orchestration capabilities that can turn visibility into dynamic, real-time decisions. Otherwise, complexity grows faster than an organization’s ability to manage it.
-Jason Minghini
Senior Vice President, Supply Chain Solutions
Kenco
Build a real paper trail for how you screen carriers, starting now. Post Montgomery v. Caribe, putting one unvetted carrier on the road can be a company-ending judgment, not a slap on the wrist. Unfortunately, most of the industry hasn’t priced that in yet.
-Vlad Kadurin
Chief Product and Operations Officer
Ship.Cars
Build a data- and AI-enabled procurement function while equally investing in your people strategy to thrive in a fast-paced, tech-enabled environment. Upskill teams, deploy flexible resources, and align capacity to demand. Without the right talent supported by training and tools, you’ll lack the insight and agility needed to stay competitive on cost, resilience, and supplier performance.
-Kristen Rellihan
Managing Director
ProcureAbility
Lead as an AI-enabled business transformation partner in supply chain and operations. Highly experienced firms must amplify their expertise into practical, measurable solutions—helping clients move beyond consulting principles alone to realize real execution, performance improvement, and lasting business impact using much more powerful AI powered-workflows.
-Jon Siffing
Founder – Principle
Dayton Management Group
Modernize your warehouse technology before “good enough” becomes a competitive liability. Outdated systems create unnecessary work, limit productivity and make it harder to attract and retain employees who expect effective digital tools.
-Steve Shebuski
VP of Pre-Sales
MCA Connect
Get real data from your physical operations. Most warehouses still run on educated guesses. AI can close that gap fast—but only if it can see what’s actually happening on the floor. The window for operating blind is closing—but the opportunity for those who move now is wide open.
-Joseph Mirabile
Vice President Operations
Gather AI
Integrate technology as your backbone. Let data drive every major decision—from capital allocation to predictive maintenance and safety. Anticipate and serve your customers’ needs using the data.
-Hooman Yazhari
CEO
TEN (Transportation Equipment Network)
Don’t delay automation. Competition just got more intense, and customers expect faster fulfillment. If you’re not using automation to optimize, you’re behind. Avoid lengthy, capex-heavy build-outs as they’ll only delay the benefits. Implement a flexible, crawl-walk-run automation strategy that allows you to achieve immediate efficiencies and then scale and adapt as customer expectations evolve.
-Anthony Jules
CEO and Co-founder
Robust.AI