The federal Transportation Security Administration (TSA) yesterday proposed a rule that would mandate some surface transportation owners and operators, including those running pipelines and railroads, to meet certain cyber risk management and reporting requirements.
The new rule would require:
Owner/operators of pipelines and/or railroads that have a higher cybersecurity risk profiles to establish and maintain a comprehensive cyber risk management program;
Owner/operators that are currently required to report significant physical security concerns to TSA to also report cybersecurity incidents to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; and
Higher-risk pipeline owner/operators to designate a physical security coordinator and report significant physical security concerns to TSA.
"TSA has collaborated closely with its industry partners to increase the cybersecurity resilience of the nation's critical transportation infrastructure," TSA Administrator David Pekoske said in a release. "The requirements in the proposed rule seek to build on this collaborative effort and further strengthen the cybersecurity posture of surface transportation stakeholders. We look forward to industry and public input on this proposed regulation."
The notice came a week after a White House representative warned the trucking freight industry that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has remained the most active and persistent cyber threat to the U.S. government, private sector, and critical infrastructure networks. The briefing came from a member of the administration’s Office of the National Cyber Director, in an address to attendees at the National Motor Freight Traffic Association (NMFTA)’s Cybersecurity Conference.
“In January, the National Cyber Director testified in front of Congress along with colleagues from CISA, NSA, and the FBI about this threat from the PRC, dubbed Volt Typhoon,” speaker Stephen Viña said in his remarks. “Volt Typhoon conducted cyber operations focused not on financial gain, espionage, or state secrets but on developing deep access to our critical infrastructure. This includes the energy sector transportation systems, among many others. A prolonged interruption to these critical services could disrupt our ability to mobilize in the event of a national emergency or conflict and can create panic among our citizens. Ultimately, if trucking stops, America stops.”
The practice consists of 5,000 professionals from Accenture and from Avanade—the consulting firm’s joint venture with Microsoft. They will be supported by Microsoft product specialists who will work closely with the Accenture Center for Advanced AI. Together, that group will collaborate on AI and Copilot agent templates, extensions, plugins, and connectors to help organizations leverage their data and gen AI to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and drive growth, they said on Thursday.
Accenture and Avanade say they have already developed some AI tools for these applications. For example, a supplier discovery and risk agent can deliver real-time market insights, agile supply chain responses, and better vendor selection, which could result in up to 15% cost savings. And a procure-to-pay agent could improve efficiency by up to 40% and enhance vendor relations and satisfaction by addressing urgent payment requirements and avoiding disruptions of key services
Likewise, they have also built solutions for clients using Microsoft 365 Copilot technology. For example, they have created Copilots for a variety of industries and functions including finance, manufacturing, supply chain, retail, and consumer goods and healthcare.
Another part of the new practice will be educating clients how to use the technology, using an “Azure Generative AI Engineer Nanodegree program” to teach users how to design, build, and operationalize AI-driven applications on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. The online classes will teach learners how to use AI models to solve real-world problems through automation, data insights, and generative AI solutions, the firms said.
“We are pleased to deepen our collaboration with Accenture to help our mutual customers develop AI-first business processes responsibly and securely, while helping them drive market differentiation,” Judson Althoff, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Microsoft, said in a release. “By bringing together Copilots and human ambition, paired with the autonomous capabilities of an agent, we can accelerate AI transformation for organizations across industries and help them realize successful business outcomes through pragmatic innovation.”
Supply chains are poised for accelerated adoption of mobile robots and drones as those technologies mature and companies focus on implementing artificial intelligence (AI) and automation across their logistics operations.
That’s according to data from Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Mobile Robots and Drones, released this week. The report shows that several mobile robotics technologies will mature over the next two to five years, and also identifies breakthrough and rising technologies set to have an impact further out.
Gartner’s Hype Cycle is a graphical depiction of a common pattern that arises with each new technology or innovation through five phases of maturity and adoption. Chief supply chain officers can use the research to find robotic solutions that meet their needs, according to Gartner.
Gartner, Inc.
The mobile robotic technologies set to mature over the next two to five years are: collaborative in-aisle picking robots, light-cargo delivery robots, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for transport, mobile robotic goods-to-person systems, and robotic cube storage systems.
“As organizations look to further improve logistic operations, support automation and augment humans in various jobs, supply chain leaders have turned to mobile robots to support their strategy,” Dwight Klappich, VP analyst and Gartner fellow with the Gartner Supply Chain practice, said in a statement announcing the findings. “Mobile robots are continuing to evolve, becoming more powerful and practical, thus paving the way for continued technology innovation.”
Technologies that are on the rise include autonomous data collection and inspection technologies, which are expected to deliver benefits over the next five to 10 years. These include solutions like indoor-flying drones, which utilize AI-enabled vision or RFID to help with time-consuming inventory management, inspection, and surveillance tasks. The technology can also alleviate safety concerns that arise in warehouses, such as workers counting inventory in hard-to-reach places.
“Automating labor-intensive tasks can provide notable benefits,” Klappich said. “With AI capabilities increasingly embedded in mobile robots and drones, the potential to function unaided and adapt to environments will make it possible to support a growing number of use cases.”
Humanoid robots—which resemble the human body in shape—are among the technologies in the breakthrough stage, meaning that they are expected to have a transformational effect on supply chains, but their mainstream adoption could take 10 years or more.
“For supply chains with high-volume and predictable processes, humanoid robots have the potential to enhance or supplement the supply chain workforce,” Klappich also said. “However, while the pace of innovation is encouraging, the industry is years away from general-purpose humanoid robots being used in more complex retail and industrial environments.”
In 2015, blockchain (the technology that makes digital currencies such as bitcoin work) was starting to be explored as a solution for supply chains. It promised cost savings, increased efficiency, and heightened transparency, among other benefits. For that reason, many companies were happy to run pilots testing blockchain for themselves. Today, these small-scale projects have been replaced by large-scale enterprise adoption of blockchain-based supply chain solutions. There are plenty of choices now for blockchain supply chain products, platforms, and providers. This makes the option to use blockchain available now to nearly everyone in the sector. This wealth of choice does, however, make it more difficult to decide which blockchain integration is best (or, indeed, if your organization needs to use it at all). To find the right blockchain, companies need to consider three factors: cost, sustainability, and the ultimate goal of trying new technology.
Choosing the right blockchain for an enterprise supply chain begins with the most basic consideration: cost. Blockchains work by securely recording “transactions,” and in a supply chain, those transactions are essentially database updates. However, making such updates has varying costs on different chains. If a container moves locations, that entry is updated, and a transaction is recorded. Enterprises need to figure out how many products, containers, or pieces of information they will process daily. Each of these can be considered a transaction. Now, some blockchains cost not even $1 to record a million movements. Other chains can cost thousands of dollars for the same amount of recording. Understanding the amount of activity you will need to record against the cost of transactions is the first place for an enterprise to start when considering blockchain. Ask the provider which blockchain their product is built on, and its average transaction cost. This will help you find the most cost-effective product or integration.
The question of cost becomes even more important when your supply chain partners have other transparency obligations, like that of a “Protected Designation of Origin” product. This kind of requirement means that your adoption of blockchain will likely involve more transactions, or records, to serve your purpose, which means utilizing a blockchain with lower costs is imperative. This was the case for producers of Fontina cow’s cheese. This is a “Protected Designation of Origin cheese,” which means it must come from the Aosta Valley (and only the Aosta Valley) in Italy. Utilizing blockchain helps prove the provenance of this artisanal cheese to its customers and partners, which is one of the reasons it was adopted by the group responsible for its production (the Consortium of Producers and Protection of Fontina PDO). However, when reporting on their adoption of blockchain in their supply chain, they also acknowledged that the potential high costs of using the technology were a concern (but this was allayed by their choice of blockchain platform and design of their pilot).
The second consideration is sustainability. Supply chain partners are being pressured to deliver on ambitious environmental, social, and governance (ESG) targets across the board. The addition of new technologies to any system, especially technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) that are known for their energy use, can be counterproductive to meeting these expectations. However, just as different blockchains have different costs to run transactions, so too do different chains have different environmental footprints. This can also be easily vetted by asking your provider if the chain is proof-of-work or proof-of-stake.
Proof-of-work is most well-known because it is used by bitcoin, and can cost an extremely high amount of energy and electricity to run. If the blockchain is proof-of-stake, it is more likely to be environmentally friendly. The good news is that many supply chain and logistics service providers are stepping in to offer these greener blockchains as an option for their projects. One of these is Finboot in Spain, which worked with the energy company CEPSA to implement blockchain to trace vegetable oil from its source to its end use in its biodegradable surfactant production. Still, ask for their sustainability credentials anyway. If there’s any reason to doubt that the blockchain being used or the solution being proposed is carbon-neutral, the solution has to be disregarded. There’s just no reason to adopt more technology if it will present more problems later on.
The final consideration is the toughest but also the most rewarding: the ultimate goal of adopting blockchain. What improvement is the most important to your business? Blockchain could address several of them. For example, there is a movement towards maintaining a fair trade for goods like chocolate and coffee. However, the true “fairness” of the provenance is only as good as the records. Blockchain can help here, as proven by the household Italian coffee brand Lavazza.They integrated blockchain to simplify and streamline the supply chain journey of its La Reserva de Tierra Cuba coffee bean, making it easy for consumers to see the journey from farm to cup. Each coffee bean harvest and reception, environmental data and processing information, quality control, and transportation are recorded on a publicly available blockchain for the company and the consumer to use. They are also using a carbon-neutral chain with low costs, helping them hit their sustainability as well as their fair-trade goals.
Improving internal provenance records is also a valid reason to adopt blockchain, making it easier to maintain a stringent, auditable record that can be provided to other departments, shareholders, governments, or regulators. This kind of provenance can be more detailed and more sensitive to attempts to access or change the data. So, using blockchain to certify medicine shipments, as one example, allows an enterprise to securely control a record of authentic, noncounterfeit medications. This is especially important if counterfeit medicines end up causing harm and government agencies investigate. Otherwise, blockchain can help make supply chains more resilient to digital attacks or intrusion, reduce costs of maintaining records, fight the threat of counterfeit goods, and more.
The supply chain sector is under pressure to be even more efficient and reliable despite a challenging economic and geopolitical landscape. Still,a recent report from EY stated that enterprises plan to “shake up their supply chain strategies to become more resilient, sustainable, and collaborative with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders.” If that is the case for your organization, then certainly blockchain can help you. Blockchain’s internal provenance and integrity makes a supply chain more resilient, including by helping identify potential disruptions early, streamlining regulatory compliance and internal audits, and detecting counterfeit products and fraudulent activities. Blockchain is also a tool for collaboration with your stakeholders. Lavazza is just one example of how it can be used to give customers verifiable information about product origin, journey, and authenticity, building confidence and loyalty through transparency and traceability. And if you choose a blockchain that is itself sustainable, it can help achieve sustainability goals too. The most important filter, however, remains the ultimate goal. What do you want to improve or change about your operations? If the answer involves becoming more resilient, more transparent, or more efficient, blockchain can help. Use this goal to evaluate your options first, followed by an analysis of costs and its sustainability metrics. By considering these three factors, you are more likely to find a scalable, resilient, and efficiency-delivering use of blockchain in your supply chain business.
Mid-marketorganizations are confident that adopting AI applications can deliver up to fourfold returns within 12 months, but first they have to get over obstacles like gaps in workforce readiness, data governance, and tech infrastructure, according to a study from Seattle consulting firm Avanade.
The report found that 85% of businesses are expressing concern over losing competitive ground without rapid AI adoption, and 53% of them expect to increase their budgets for gen AI projects by up to 25%. But despite that enthusiasm, nearly half are stuck at business case (48%) or proof of concept (44%) stage.
The results come from “Avanade Trendlines: AI Value Report 2025,” which includes two surveys conducted by the market research firms McGuire Research Services and Vanson Bourne. Conducted in in August and September 2024, they encompass responses from a total of 4,100 IT decision makers and senior business decision makers across Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, UK, and U.S.
Additional results showed that 76% of respondents state that poor data quality and governance inhibits their AI progress. To overcome that, companies are stepping up investments in that area, with 44% planning to implement new data platforms and 41% setting governance standards. And to support the scaling of AI, budgets will focus on data and analytics (27%), automation (17%), and security and cyber resilience (15%).
"Mid-market leaders are at a defining moment with AI—where investments must not only boost efficiency but ignite future innovation and sustainable growth," Rodrigo Caserta, CEO of Avanade, said in a release. "The tension between cost-cutting and growth ambitions shows the AI value equation is still being worked out. Productivity with AI isn't just about doing things faster; it's about reimagining work itself. People are central to this shift, requiring workforce alignment, clear communication, and new training. Leaders must rethink how they support collaboration, measure productivity, and ultimately, assess the true value AI brings to their organizations."
Editor's note:This article was revised on November 13 to correct the site of Avanade's headquarters; it is located in Seattle.
Third party logistics provider (3PL) C.H. Robinson has applied generative AI tools to automate various steps across the entire lifecycle of a freight shipment, the Minnesota company said last week.
C.H. Robinson said it created AI-based technology that reads incoming email then replicates tasks a person would do, including giving customers a price quote, accepting a load, setting appointments for pickup and delivery, and checking on the load in transit. The company has used the approach to automate more than 10,000 of those routine transactions per day, allowing shippers who use email to get the same speed-to-market and cost savings as customers who use C.H. Robinson’s online platform.
After starting with price quotes, the company said it has applied generative AI to increasingly complex tasks. “We announced in May that we’d been using our new tech for emailed price requests. Within a few short months, we created new models to automate more shipping steps and have already implemented them at scale,” Arun Rajan, the company’s Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, said in a release. “This a major efficiency breakthrough for the industry and for supply chains around the world. When you think about retailers that need hundreds of different products on their shelves or automakers that rely on just-in-time delivery for the 30,000 different parts in a car, saving hours and minutes on every shipment matters.”
The technology also saves time, cutting the task for a person to take care of an emailed load tender from as much as four hours to 90 seconds, according to Mark Albrecht, the company’s Vice President for Artificial Intelligence.
“Once a person got to the email in their inbox, it still took an average of seven minutes to manually enter all the shipment details into our system – and that’s for a single load,” Albrecht said. “If the email tendered us 20 loads, a person would be stuck manually entering the information one load at a time. With generative AI, we can process all 20 loads simultaneously in the same 90 seconds. That’s an enormous time savings, especially when you consider we’ve scaled this to thousands of shipment orders per day just since June.”