CEO Stefan Paul:
Shaping Tomorrow’s Supply Chains with AI
As a service provider, everything we do at Kuehne+Nagel is centred around our customers. The trust they place in us, combined with the dedication of our people, has allowed us to build a leading role in global sea and air logistics. We have reached this point by staying true to a mindset of speed, efficiency, customer centricity, and a strong focus on digitisation.
Now, with the rapid rise and accessibility of AI, we see this moment as an opportunity to rethink how logistics can work: faster, more connected, and more intuitive for every customer.
For many years now, we have invested significantly in modernising our technology landscape and consolidating our proprietary transport management systems. Our Digital Ecosystem became a core pillar of our Roadmap 2026 strategy, and with that we built a modern cloud backbone and an AI platform that allows us to innovate at scale and at speed. Today, every booking, rate discussion, carrier interaction, and exception runs through our modern, cloud-enabled infrastructure designed for reliability, transparency, and speed. This foundation enables more consistent service, higher quality interactions, and a smoother experience at every touchpoint.
Our partnership with globally leading cloud providers is a key part of this foundation piece as they provide resilience, computing power, and acceleration. But the real differentiator is what we build on top of that infrastructure: our logistics expertise, our data, and the workflows that make our service reliable.
As we continue to expand our own AI capabilities in partnership with leading cloud providers, we are also powering their global datacentre expansion by providing them with our end-to-end logistics expertise. In doing so, we are not only accelerating our internal use of AI but also enabling hyperscalers to bring the benefits of AI to more customers around the world.
In our industry, we have been using predictive models for quoting, pricing, and planning for a long time. Now generative AI has come along and significantly expanded what we can automate, analyse and optimise. From the beginning, we chose not to rely on a single AI solution. Instead, we built a cloud platform that selects the right AI offering for each task and we enrich it with our proprietary data. This gives us the flexibility and resilience we need in a fast moving environment, while keeping our intellectual property inside the Company.
One of the biggest challenges we face with AI is not the technology per se, but as leaders, we must learn how to lead our teams into a future we ourselves are still learning to navigate.”
Stefan Paul
A powerful example of how AI strengthens our business is the way it supports our quoting process. Our Air Logistics business unit is using AI for spot-pricing decisions. Instead of taking time to analyse markets and capacity manually, our teams can now respond to customers with speed and confidence. These insights flow into our digital customer platform, myKN, where customers experience the benefits directly: booking becomes faster, interactions become smoother, and information becomes clearer.
And it’s not only pricing. In customs brokerage, Claire, our new AI assistant, enables us to summarise complex documents and prepare declarations much faster, allowing our teams to focus on solving exceptions while routine work is handled in the background.
Our goal is to have, across all platforms, processes that normally take hours happening almost instantly. Tender responses arriving sooner, documents handled more accurately, and customers gaining earlier visibility into their shipments. Put simply, AI can help us serve our customers with greater speed, clarity and reliability, making every interaction easier and every decision quicker.
Skilling our teams on AI is also core to how we operate. We focus on practical AI literacy, giving colleagues tools they can use immediately in their daily work. Already, tens of thousands of colleagues use AI tools every day, and adoption is growing rapidly.
Now that the important first phase of AI development has been completed, we are in part two, the scaling phase for the next couple of years. During this phase, we are rolling out AI agents that support order intake, customer communication, document processing, and exception handling around the globe, shifting from isolated wins to reusable capabilities that make every business unit operate more efficiently.
Looking ahead, we see a future where autonomous AI agents manage routine complexity end-to-end, enabling our teams to focus even more on relationships, problem solving, and high-value decision-making while intelligent systems absorb repetitive work and accelerate the organisation overall.
Above all, at Kuehne+Nagel, we are using AI to grow our business and create value for all our stakeholders – customers, employees and investors – and strengthening our position as a trusted partner in global logistics.