How Will Gen AI Transform Global Trade & the Supply Chain This Year?

2024 marked a turning point for Gen AI, with its influence reshaping industries across the board. As its adoption continues to grow, its impact on maritime and supply chains is set to expand even further in 2025.

Forbes reports that 72% of executives now use generative AI at least once a week, a significant rise from 37% in 2023, according to a survey by the University of Pennsylvania’s AI research center.

For the global trade ecosystem, the appeal of explainability and context has been undeniable. With massive volumes of data generated daily – from AIS signals and satellite imagery to trade documents and sanctions updates – human decision-making alone can no longer keep pace amidst frequent disruptions, black swan events, and geopolitical shifts.

This blog post draws insights from Windward’s 2025 Top Trends in Global Trade report, exploring where Gen AI is going in 2025 and how organizations can harness this transformative technology.

The Shift from Individual to Organizational Adoption of Gen AI

At the beginning of the Gen AI revolution, which started with Chat GPT, many people looked at Gen AI as something that they could dabble with on the side to change the way they worked as individuals. We saw a shift in 2024, as organizations began asking how to consistently bring Gen AI into their day-to-day tasks in a collaborative manner. 

Now, organizations are asking how to best implement this technology inside their workflows, integrate Gen AI agents within their systems, and much more.   

Gen AI’s technical maturity will spur much greater enterprise adoption in 2025. It will become a must-have for forward-looking organizations in the global trade and supply chain ecosystems in 2025. 

The challenge will not solely include managing or integrating data. It will be about making sense of it all, in real-time, across countless interconnected systems, in a coordinated and systemic manner. This approach will enable organizations to significantly amplify their results. Scalable intelligence is crucial for staying ahead in an industry where delays or missteps can ripple throughout the global supply chain. 

Stay tuned for virtual expert capabilities that save time and resources, standardize communication, and drive business growth through more efficient workflows.

Workflow Automation Will Work

Reasons why organizations struggled to keep pace in 2024: 

• Too much data
• A lack of human resources
• A cascade of unexpected developments

It almost goes without saying that these factors prevent timely and strategic decisions.  

Worsening matters, maritime organizations are struggling to hire, train, and onboard team members and experts – both in terms of speed and depth of domain understanding.

Putting “dots on a map” for maritime domain awareness is no longer sufficient. Some of those dots likely represent ships that are not where they purport to be and some that are not who they purport to be. 

Meanwhile, evolving risk management requirements have significantly increased interactions between stakeholders, but there is a shortage of experts to manage these voluminous communications. Freight forwarding operators, for instance, spend 15% of their time providing updates to customers and gathering shipment details. 

The Future Is Here: Embrace It

As we move into 2025, Gen AI is set to become an essential tool for organizations navigating the complexities of global trade and supply chains. The ability to harness real-time, scalable intelligence will be the differentiator for businesses striving to stay competitive in an interconnected world. By integrating Gen AI into workflows and embracing automation, forward-looking organizations can overcome data overload, improve decision-making, and drive meaningful growth. The future is here – it’s time to embrace it.

Check out our 2025 trends report for more insights like these. 

See Gen AI in Action