Wakeo's new AI tool grades carriers on delivery record before freight tenders

A carrier that wins a tender on price can end up costing the shipper more once delays, extra inventory, and demurrage and detention charges show up. That gap is the target of Supply Chain Advisor, an AI tool Paris-based Wakeo launched on November 3, 2026. It ranks routes and transport options for each freight flow on total cost and measured performance, and it's available now to shippers and freight forwarders.

The interesting part is where the evidence comes from. Supply Chain Advisor sets a company's own shipping results beside millions of past shipments drawn from across the market, then ranks route and transport options by the priorities each customer chooses. For a transport procurement lead, that pushes the tender toward a question rate sheets can't answer: which provider has actually delivered on this lane?

Two data sets and a ranked route list

Wakeo's launch announcement, carried in The Loadstar's press-release section, describes the tool as a blend of two inputs. The first is Wakeo's real-time visibility data, which tracks how every transport provider has performed for the company itself, covering sea, air, road, rail and parcel flows. The second is Trusted Routes, Wakeo's benchmark of the routes and transport options available across the market.

Each team then decides which factors to prioritize among cost, reliability, transit time, exposure to disruptions and CO2 emissions. With those weights set, the advisor grades the current transport plan, points out the weakest routes and proposes alternatives.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive, where Marina Mayer covered the launch on November 10, quoted Wakeo co-founder and CTO Loïc Marzin describing the modeling step. The system measures a company's real results against millions of historical shipments, forecasts how each route and option is likely to perform, and ranks them by the customer's priorities. People still make the final call, but they see the estimated benefit of each option before they commit.

Reliability is where the tracking history earns its keep. Wakeo says millions of historical shipment data points feed its reliability scoring, and its blog makes the case with a pointed headline: "Your vessel arrived on time. Your container didn't." The company argues its data reveals a reliability gap that carrier schedules don't show. If that gap appears on a buyer's lanes, a carrier's published schedule performance would be a weaker tender input than the record of the buyer's own containers.

Coverage matters, because a benchmark is only useful if it includes the lane being bid. On its product page, Wakeo claims coverage of more than 180 countries, 98% of the carrier market and more than 400,000 port-to-port combinations, with billions of AIS, schedule and transport data points processed. Those are vendor figures. Buyers could still use them as a starting point to check whether their highest-spend lanes are covered.

Why a tracking company is grading carriers

The advisor also signals a change in what Wakeo offers. The company was founded in 2016 as a pioneer of multimodal real-time visibility. In the announcement, Cote said Wakeo was built ten years ago to show companies where their shipments were in real time. The goal was to let them respond quickly when disruptions hit, reduce emergency spending and keep their own customers happy. He presented the launch as his answer to a question customers raised again and again: how could they do better on the next shipment?

Wakeo's product page states the distinction plainly: most supply chain visibility solutions stop at telling you where your shipments are. In this design, tracking data collected to fight today's delays becomes the evidence base for the next carrier award. Wakeo now calls itself an AI-powered supply chain advisor that helps companies move their supply chains from reactive to predictive.

Procurement and logistics on one scorecard

Wakeo says the tool gives procurement and supply chain teams a common language and a single platform. Procurement teams optimize costs. Supply chain teams are judged on delivery. According to the announcement, the two groups frequently work at cross purposes and lack any common method for balancing price and performance, so the advisor shows both of them the same cost, reliability, transit time and risk data.

It doesn't ask anyone to give up their tender workflow. Wakeo says the advisor works alongside the tendering tools, TMS and spreadsheets teams already use, with Wakeo as the common data source, and that it supports business reviews as well as tenders. That's a sensible design choice. Teams that have built tender templates over years of bid cycles are unlikely to rebuild them for a new scoring engine.

The product page spells out what "total cost" means for the buyer. It pitches procurement teams on going beyond rate benchmarks by factoring transit time, reliability and risk into what each route really costs, and on replacing scattered spreadsheets with one place for scores, market rates and simulations. Putting the rate and the performance record in the same view is the practical form of the shared method the announcement says the two teams lack.

Customers quoted at launch describe the same change. Julien Peignot manages Michelin's intercontinental logistics control tower. He said resilient supply chains will rest on facts rather than assumptions about how carriers and routes perform. He added that disruptions now redraw the map within months. In his view, the companies that keep their promises will be those able to weigh every option on cost, reliability and emissions before problems reach them.

Bert Lemmens leads Terumo's EMEA supply chain and its SCM global office. He said visibility is a starting point for a better conversation, not the end goal. He argued that a dot on a map does not create value on its own, and that transport data pays off when it changes decisions in purchasing, routing and sustainability. The shippers Wakeo lists include Michelin, Acer, Uniqlo, Haier, Groupe SEB, Hilti, B. Braun, Air Liquide and Medline. Its forwarder customers include CLASQUIN, Zufall, a.hartrodt and CEVA Logistics.

The tracking history has to exist first

An advisor that scores carriers on a company's own flows is only as good as the record of those flows. A GS1 US study, The Supply Chain Readiness Gap, which Supply & Demand Chain Executive covered on November 12, suggests many companies haven't built that record yet.

Put next to Wakeo's launch, the survey points to who benefits first. Shippers already tracking their lanes on a visibility platform bring the performance history the advisor needs to score their own carriers. Companies that still reconcile shipment data manually would likely need to fix that before a performance-weighted tender means much. GS1 US found that 62% of respondents named data fragmentation as a major barrier to innovation, second only to lack of funding at 63%.

GS1 US also sorted respondents into maturity tiers based on data integration, governance, automation, collaboration and standards adoption. Only 20% landed in the high tier, with 72% medium and 8% low. The spread is wide: 81% of high-maturity organizations report centralized, real-time data integration, against 38% of all respondents, and 85% have a clear, actively executed governance strategy, against 13% of low-maturity organizations.

The study measures data readiness across organizations in general, not Wakeo's tool or its customers, so it describes the market the advisor is entering rather than its results. One figure still maps closely onto Wakeo's pitch. Strong internal alignment was reported by 78% of high-maturity organizations but by only 50% of all respondents, which suggests the kind of internal split the shared scorecard is meant to bridge is common.

GS1 US links the 41% who pilot well but struggle to scale to data and collaboration gaps. For an advisor that scores lane by lane, that could mean sharp early results on well-tracked lanes and slower progress on the rest. Gena Morgan, VP of global standards at GS1 US, said the research shows technology alone is not enough and that readiness requires strong trading partner collaboration, trusted data and standards-based interoperability. High-maturity organizations were more likely to report easier regulatory compliance (60%), reduced costs (52%) and faster time to market (46%).

Thin history doesn't make the tool useless, though. The market benchmark is built to show how routes and providers perform across the market as well as on the buyer's own flows, so a team can judge a carrier it has never used before signing. The advisor's value shows up mainly where the cheapest option and the most reliable one are different carriers.

Questions for the next carrier award

For a procurement director weighing the tool before the next bid cycle, the launch details support a few specific checks:

1. Which of our lanes will be scored on our own tracked shipments, and which only on the market benchmark?
2. Who sets the weights for cost, reliability, transit time, disruption exposure and CO2, and do procurement and logistics both sign off on them?
3. How do the advisor's scores and simulations get into the tender template, TMS or spreadsheet we already run?

Wakeo says the advisor recommends and people decide. The first tender cycles run with it will show how often the top-ranked option is also the cheapest one. When it isn't, the estimated benefit Wakeo shows for each option is the figure a buyer would take to the CFO to justify paying the higher rate.