The $10 Trillion Market: AI in logistics and the governance that decides whether it pays off

Arizona State University’s Brett Duarte on AI supply chain strategy, part 3: AI in logistics, control towers, network design, and supply chain governance.

Logistics is a $10 trillion industry once you add up freight, transportation, warehousing, 3PL and 4PL. Brett Duarte puts that number on the table in the first four minutes, and it reframes every AI conversation that follows. This is how AI in logistics either earns its budget or quietly doesn't.

This is part three, the final episode of our AI supply chain strategy series with Clinical Associate Professor Brett Duarte of Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business. We covered procurement in part one and operations in part two. Here we finish with logistics, then widen the lens to the infrastructure and supply chain governance that everything else sits on.

Brett splits AI in logistics into tactical and strategic work. Tactical includes route optimization and ETA prediction, capacity and load optimization so containers and trailers run full, and disruption management through control towers that sense a problem and act on it. Strategic means network design: where distribution centers go, how big their footprint needs to be, where the coverage gaps are, and whether carbon emissions can come down at the same time to address sustainability.

Then Casey pushes him on the part executives keep asking about. Trusted data sources. Platform choices. Agent-to-agent protocolsand model context protocol. Managing a growing population of agents and their lifecycle. And the ROI roadmap with KPIs that leadership will accept. Brett's line on supply chain governance is the one worth writing down: it's a business capability, and companies that treat it as an IT project pay for it later.

What you'll learn in this episode.

• Why the $10 trillion logistics number changes how you size an AI business case.
• Where AI in logistics pays off first, and which use case to build before all the others.
• The four tactical AI use cases Brett teaches first, and why disruption management is the one to start with.
• How a control tower agent pulls outside signals on weather, earthquakes and disruption events, then decides which orders are affected.
• What "citizen developers" can build inside operations, and the guardrails they need.
• The network design questions AI answers: DC placement, footprint, service versus cost, coverage gaps, consolidation.
• Why sustainability documentation is turning into a competitive edge instead of a spreadsheet chore.
• Brett's case that supply chain governance is a business cap