DeepFabric has moved six AI agents into live use at Kenco in just three months, a pace that stands out in a field where many enterprise AI projects never make it beyond demonstrations. The tools are now active across commercial, operations, transportation and client services, and the two companies are already planning to expand that footprint to 20 supply chain agents across the North American third-party logistics group over the next year.
The deployment matters because it tac...
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kles one of the sector’s most persistent problems: turning promising pilot projects into systems that deliver in day-to-day operations. Gartner has forecast that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027, citing rising costs, uncertain business value and weak risk controls. DeepFabric’s work with Kenco suggests that, at least in some cases, a tightly scoped rollout can bridge that gap.
According to Kalyan Kommineni, DeepFabric’s founder and chief executive, the partnership began when Kenco’s chief digital and information officer, Pal Narayanan, approached the company after seeing its work elsewhere in supply chain technology. Kommineni said the two organisations found common ground in a shared preference for practical deployment rather than abstract AI experimentation.
That emphasis on execution is central to DeepFabric’s approach. Kommineni said the company aims to get an agent into production quickly while limiting risk, beginning with a proof of concept built around the customer’s own data. He added that failures are expected during testing, but they should happen outside live operations. Kenco, for its part, reported that none of the six agents caused disruption for customers as they were introduced into production.
The strongest early gains have come in audit work, one of the more tedious but commercially important areas in logistics. Kenco operates 141 distribution facilities and 43 million square feet of warehouse space across 33 states and Canada, creating a large volume of documents and reconciliations to review. DeepFabric says its freight auditor is among its most widely used agents, alongside proposal management and inventory management tools, and claims audit spend has fallen by 45% while request-for-proposal response times have improved by up to 30%.
The appeal is obvious in a sector where much of the work involves repeated checks between warehouses, carriers and customers. Kommineni described audit as a labour-intensive process that teams would often prefer to hand over to automation. He said the challenge is not simply to speed up one task, but to reduce the number of failure points that appear each time data passes from one party to another.
Measurement is another crucial part of the model. Rather than treating all automation as a single exercise, DeepFabric says each agent is assessed against a different set of outcomes. For a proposal tool, the question may be whether a team can pursue more bids without increasing headcount. For an audit agent, the focus may be manual hours per 100 invoices. Kommineni said the company first establishes a pre-agent baseline, then compares that with performance after deployment.
DeepFabric also takes a pragmatic view of model choice. Kommineni argued that buyers do not need either a single all-purpose model or a sprawling collection of highly customised ones. Instead, he said the right answer usually lies somewhere in between, with different tasks routed to different models depending on performance and cost. DeepFabric assumes the operational burden of managing that mix, including token economics and execution.
Kenco distinguishes between agentic AI, which performs tasks within defined guardrails, and generative AI, which is used more for content creation and analysis. DeepFabric handles the agentic layer, while Kenco retains approval rights over outputs through inspection and override features built into the platform.
The collaboration also reflects a broader shift in enterprise AI buying behaviour. Supply chain leaders are increasingly looking for systems tied directly to revenue, margin, cost and service rather than to technology demonstrations alone. DeepFabric, which has also announced general availability for its supply chain platform, says its customers include Kenco, HelloFresh, NFI, TwinMed, Merchants Fleet and Weber, with reported results including up to 10 times return on investment in freight audit and faster customer response times.
For Kommineni, the company’s selling point is that it does not stop at advice. After years in consulting, he said he wanted DeepFabric to focus on helping customers actually implement what many advisers only recommend. In Kenco’s case, that practical promise has so far translated into live agents, measurable gains and a plan to scale further.
Source: Noah Wire Services
