Currently, logistics visibility is a market divided between two groups: digital service providers—such as tech startups—who excel at developing visibility software but lack hands-on logistics experience, and 3PL professionals who are highly knowledgeable in logistics yet still working to perfect their digital offerings.

For a business aiming to achieve full visibility for their product, this means covering the entire spectrum—from locating containers or SKUs to monitoring internal conditions like temperature. These layers, including visibility into potential risks, cost and emissions along the way, represent what is required today.

Moreover, visibility alone is no longer sufficient. Technological advancements, including artificial intelligence, are now being deployed to elevate visibility to a higher level known as decision intelligence.

From visibility to decision intelligence

When talking about visibility within logistics, it is more appropriate now to refer to it as decision intelligence, as visibility per se became the normalcy for most businesses – the very base on which decisions are taken. Henrik Killander, Head of Product Development & Partnerships at Maersk, explains: “Visibility needs to go beyond tracking shipments and estimated time of arrivals. It needs to cover key aspects of making decisions around a shipment or a product. That means covering lead time, cost, emissions, risks and disruptions. So it's when you have these that you can make trade off decisions and unlock the true power of visibility”. Today, decision intelligence can be achieved by combining visibility data with AI data and machine learning to achieve a more connected view, powered by modules that strive to provide businesses with actionable insights.

Top trends for visibility and decision intelligence in 2026

1. Planning systems: the use of software for visibility and prediction isn’t new. A strong visibility planning system can link what businesses are planning for the scale of their supply chain and advance these very quickly. Each planning systems has now a large language model (LLM) integration that embeds an advanced AI language model into the logistics software to enhance its capabilities. For example, the user can interact with the system using plain language instead of complex menus or codes by speaking to the system and asking for their query, this is called “Intelligent Query Handling”, additionally LLMs can also interpret complex data, search from multiple sources, present it, translate it, and much more. making logistics more user-friendly and adaptive. Advance planning systems can identify a stock trend, rebook an order, or change mode of transport or adjust the urgency of a fulfilment. These systems can also integrate with Agentic AI (more below). The system can take data presented in an unstructured way and prompt decisions back to several different systems. It acts as an addition on top to existing software, rather than trying to replace an entire IT infrastructure.
2. Agentic AI: While on paper AI can work with unstructured data to simplify it, the truth is that today AI is still not some magic that can deal with all kinds of data challenges. The data, in order to be used is still required be structured first. Shipment tracking, for instance, is supposed to interpret data, and create actions out of it, but without data quality there’s still a need to create an advanced visibility layer. This is a reliable, high-quality, end-to-end solution designed to enable advanced autonomous AI systems that can make decisions and act intelligently. For instance, is there a port congestion at origin? What are the alternate ports and routes that can be chosen? Some visibility data can enable workflow builders. Workflow building (to avoid risks) can use a low-code (or even no-code workflow builder) where AI agents use LLMs make decisions based on visibility data. The difference is that low code (or no code) is much simpler. The user can basically drag and drop conditions for when a container is at risk, or stuck, etc. and the system can respond with a solution. This workflow works with visibility data to connect operational professionals (humans) and automate  processes writing into Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERPs) - a centralized software platform that integrates core business processes, providing master data (orders, invoices, inventory levels) and connect logistics operations with the rest of the business – and Transportation Management System (TMS) – a specialized system for planning, executing, and optimizing transportation of goods handling route planning, carrier selection, freight auditing, and shipment tracking. All these new technologies will play a great role starting from 2026 onwards and will be crucial for logistics visibility.
3. Hyper-personalization of collected data will start in 2026 but is projected to be a “long game” initiative.  Conversational insights (based on the previously mentioned LLMs) will be able to enable hyper-personalized responses to a visibility query. With all the data from a business, the system can interact with it and suggests solutions that are not generally applicable to all businesses in the same market, but rather hyper-specific, hyper-personalised to a specific business, down to a certain business unit, product category, region, country or even warehouse. These data parameters will be able to converse with a LLM insights generator so that a specific logistics query can be answered in a very precise manner, impacting cost and production, within mere seconds.

Looking into the future

In 2026, a normalisation is expected where more predictable flows will manage excess capacity, with logistics providers supporting with great visibility offering and a suite of ad hoc products that in the long run are cost effective. “I think there's a great potential in logistics companies being able to offer a digital product that can be used anywhere in the world quite easily across any device. This means that even the upper management as well as a shop floor can use this product to offer best in class visibility” says Maurice Lyn, Head of Global Business Development Integrated Supply Chain Engine at Maersk.

Is the market ready for this now? Not all businesses have the opportunity to use these software. Many are still struggling with excel sheets, trying to figure out what the next step can be. A good integrated logistics provider can then help identifying gaps and establish the best system for their specific needs, creating a data ecosystem stitching together these capabilities into one. Automated, fully digitised, interconnected visibility is projected to become the new normal, helping customers get the decision-grade data quality and visibility they need. Decision intelligence takes information from these systems and ties it together to one unified layer to connect the dots and provide insights to fuel a strategy that will empower businesses to resist disruptions while growing. In summary, logistics decisions will be only as good as the data that they are based on. Visibility is what makes it all possible. 

Be ready for visibility to go all the way! Gain multi-carrier, multi-mode visibility, manage by exception, and act on predictive insights with Maersk Visibility Studio.

Discover more trends like these at Maersk Logistics Insights.