Transport is one of the most heavily optimised industries in the world. Vessels, terminals, wagons and trucks have been engineered for decades against cost per unit moved. The physical layer works.
The information layer around it does not work nearly as well, and that is where the money now sits. Over the past weeks we mapped where automation and AI actually pay off across maritime, rail, road, inland waterway and multimodal transport. The result is a sector report you can download below.
Why we wrote it
Sector conversations about technology tend to focus on two things: the asset and the enterprise system that records what the asset did. The cost is concentrated in the middle, in the human work of getting from one to the other.
Reading a document that arrived in an unpredictable format. Checking it against rules that were never written down. Deciding whether an exception matters. Chasing a counterparty for a correction. Reconciling one system’s version of events against another’s.
Very little of that work appears in an operations KPI. It appears in headcount, in overtime, in claims that time out, and in the quiet observation that the business cannot grow volume without growing the back office at roughly the same rate.
Six things the research surfaced
- 1.Schedule reliability is worse than most planning assumes. Sea-Intelligence recorded 56.4% in July 2026, the lowest month of the year, with late arrivals averaging more than six days. Berth plans and shift rosters across the chain are still built on arrival times everyone knows are wrong.
- 2.The biggest driver of wasted terminal moves is administrative, not operational. In a 2026 study of one container terminal, roughly half of all unproductive container moves involved boxes waiting on customs pre-clearance. The terminal simply did not know that status at the moment of stacking.
- 3.The labour picture is structural. The IRU counts 502,000 unfilled truck driver positions in Europe, with around a fifth of the workforce retiring within five years. Alongside the drivers, the operational and administrative knowledge goes too, because in most businesses it was never written down anywhere.
- 4.A documentation deadline is approaching faster than it looks. From 9 July 2027, the eFTI Regulation obliges Member State authorities to accept electronic freight information. Operators are treating it as a compliance date. It is better read as a forced data-quality upgrade with a fixed deadline.
- 5.Empty running is a data problem before it is a market problem. Eurostat recorded 21.6% of EU road freight vehicle-kilometres run empty in 2024. Freight exchanges have existed for decades; what is missing is the speed to find, evaluate and commit to a matching load inside the planning window, against constraints that are recorded in several places or not at all.
- 6.Cargo crime is larger than most operators assume, and it has changed shape. Figures presented by TAPA EMEA in April 2026 record €860.5 million in documented losses across 2024 and 2025, and fewer than 6% of reports include a loss value, so the true figure is higher. The method is shifting from breaking into vehicles towards identity fraud: fake carriers, look-alike domains and compromised email accounts.
What is in the report
Sixteen chapters covering deepsea and shortsea shipping, terminal operators, rail freight, road haulage, inland waterway and multimodal handovers, plus the cross-cutting layer that appears in every mode: the shared mailbox, quotations and tenders, compliance evidence, claims, and cargo crime.
It sets out what the industry already buys and what those purchases leave untouched, six capabilities that are now available and rarely recognised, and a catalogue of 42 specific opportunities tagged by mode and by how widely adopted they are.
Most of these opportunities sit in day-to-day operations: documents, planning, handovers and exceptions. Our Operations page shows how we approach them. If you would rather start with a clear plan, our Consultancy work begins by mapping where the work piles up and what to fix first.
On the evidence
Every figure was checked against the most authoritative source we could reach, and sources are graded in the report: regulators and peer-reviewed work, industry bodies and established trade press, and supplier-published material.
Several widely circulated industry statistics did not survive that check and were removed, including freight invoice error rates, aggregate demurrage market size, and e-CMR administrative savings. In each case the figure traced only to parties selling the related service. We would rather publish a shorter list of numbers that hold up.
If a section describes something you recognise, the most useful next step is a conversation rather than another document. Going through your operation together, where the work piles up, which handovers cause the most rework, and what your systems can and cannot do today, will tell us both more than anything we could write from the outside.
