FourKites launches customer advisory board to accelerate supply chain innovation

FourKites forms a Customer Advisory Board with major CPG industry leaders to steer product development and integrate customer insights into its AI-driven supply chain platform, signalling a strategic shift towards customer-centric innovation and proactive supply chain orchestration.

FourKites has established a Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Customer Advisory Board composed of senior supply‑chain executives from major consumer goods companies, in a move the company says...

The advisory board brings together nine industry figures the firm describes as influential, and will concentrate on product roadmaps and feature prioritisation, market validation of requirements and use cases, best practice sharing on implementation and adoption, and strategic direction through collaborative feedback. The company said the group represents some 200 years of collective supply‑chain experience.

“Launching our first Customer Advisory Board with leading CPG executives formalizes our commitment to customer-centric innovation,” said Mathew Elenjickal, Founder and Chief Executive Officer. The board will be chaired by Scott DeGroot, Managing Director of the Global Supply Chain Institute at the University of Tennessee and a former Kimberly‑Clark executive, who said the panel will “help shape technology solutions that drive measurable improvements across the entire CPG ecosystem.”

Named members include senior logistics and supply‑chain leaders from global consumer brands. According to the announcement, the board will advise on strategic product development and emerging challenges specific to CPG supply chains and feed directly into FourKites’ development process.

The move follows a recent pattern of company initiatives that stitch customers into product planning. The firm reports heavy customer engagement across its platforms, saying a large majority of active users contribute ideas via an IdeaExchange and that one in four of those suggestions have been incorporated into the product roadmap, yielding more than 250 new features. The company points to examples such as its Intelligent Control Tower, which it describes as a real‑time digital twin augmented by AI “digital workers” that automate tasks from carrier appointment scheduling to document collection.

FourKites highlighted a pilot with a cold‑storage customer in which an automated scheduling agent purportedly achieved an 87% booking success rate and 96% accuracy in requested delivery dates while processing hundreds of shipments. The company said the digital worker operates continuously and can handle many appointments in parallel, contrasting this with sequential manual processing.

Industry observers note FourKites has been formalising customer input across several fronts in recent months. The company previously announced a Food and Beverage Customer Advisory Board launched the month before, and it has been publicising additions to broader advisory councils and strategic boards that include former transportation and retail operations executives. It also expects to showcase technological directions at its forthcoming supply‑chain summit that focuses on next‑generation AI systems.

Taken together, these developments suggest a sustained push by the firm to position customer insight as a driver of its AI and automation roadmap. Critics and competitors typically caution that vendor‑led advisory panels can accelerate feature delivery yet also risk biasing product priorities toward the largest or most engaged customers; the company counters that formal boards and idea platforms broaden participation and translate customer feedback into measurable product changes.

The company reiterated that its Intelligent Control Tower and associated AI agents are central to its vision of shifting customers from reactive tracking to proactive orchestration, and it said its platform processes millions of supply‑chain events daily for more than a thousand global customers.

Source: Noah Wire Services