Chain.io and Nousot, two cloud technology providers that use artificial intelligence to help their customers tackle big data challenges, announce a partnership to deliver predictive analytics to the logistics industry.

By integrating their platforms, Chain.io and Nousot together serve logistics customers by enabling seamless, rapid delivery of intelligence that encompasses all internal and external systems and partners-with little human effort and no lengthy project engagement. Now these customers can quickly and accurately forecast elements of supply, demand, pricing, performance, operations, or any other aspect of their business, without prohibitive investments of capital or time.

While organizations in other industries have implemented digitization strategies in recent years, the logistics industry faces the unique challenge of inconsistent data spread across a worldwide multitude of suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, customers, and other players. Each year the shipping sector alone moves 90 percent of the world’s trade, valued at more than $19 trillion, in nearly 21 million containers on 100,000 vessels. The companies working together in this vast global network rely on point solutions, localized data, and legacy relationships to make decisions. This leads to inefficiencies, risks, extra costs, and missed opportunities throughout the supply chain.

“Chain.io solves our customers’ longstanding problem of connecting the disparate systems and technologies in their own organizations and across a labyrinth of partnerships, agreements, and regulations,” says Chain.io founder and CEO Brian Glick. “Once our customers have reliable and agile integrations, they can focus on innovation and speed. With Nousot, they also gain huge opportunities to use these new data streams to differentiate themselves.”

Nousot incorporates the new data streams into highly precise forecasts that customers can use to compete on factors well beyond price. The fully automated forecasts, generated in days and even hours, allow customers to better plan and prioritize routes, negotiate partnerships, determine capacity needs, allocate human resources, and anticipate customers’ needs.

Nousot’s ability to deliver such actionable predictive models is based on proprietary technology: GlobalPulse, a massive data ingestion engine that continuously collects more than 72,000 external data sets, including economic, industrial, environmental, social, and search data; and deep learning algorithms that build models autonomously, refresh them constantly with new data, and reveal their most influential drivers.

Automatic data updates for models are especially relevant for the logistics industry as it upgrades its transportation and navigation systems, meets new compliance standards, and leverages sensor and other IoT data.

“The supply chain is a natural fit for Nousot because we already capture the macroeconomic and other external data that impact this industry,” said John Papadia, one of Nousot’s founders. “Chain.io brings deep domain expertise, integrating the logistics-specific systems and readying them for automated modeling. So a combined offering helps our shared customers finally create value with the technology and data that’s available to them.”

Glick noted that this value is what sets apart the Chain.io-Nousot partnership in the supply chain technology space. “Customers want to keep pace with innovation, but what they really care about is solving problems and getting answers,” he said. “That’s what we’re delivering. Not technology, but value through technology.”

Papadia agrees. “The global supply chain is arguably the largest driver of the world’s economy, but what is driving the supply chain?” he asks. “The players in this industry have not had a reliable way to answer that. Now they do, and they can develop business strategies with those answers in mind.”