Insights from the 2025 survey show that there is a substantial increase in the rate of adoption of key visibility technologies, with Internet of Things (IoT) remaining the most widely-used technology.
The adoption of IoT for real-time shipment tracking increased from 55% in 2024 to 60% in 2025—while AI for predictive analytics saw a significant rise from 35% in 2024 to 45% in 2025.
This trend underscores the growing importance of IoT and the increasing reliance of shippers on its capabilities—which is further enhanced by AI-driven predictive analytics for inventory optimization, demand forecasting, and risk mitigation.
These technologies are particularly vital for industries such as retail, consumer goods, and perishable logistics, in which efficiency and real-time insights are critical to success.
Implementing visibility technology can present challenges, and many respondents expressed concerns about cost, data accuracy, uncertain return on investment (ROI), gaps in expertise, and integration complexity.
These insights highlight the need for stronger data validation mechanisms, improved data reliability, and enhanced training and upskilling efforts—to ensure that companies can fully leverage visibility technologies.
Upfront investment in visibility systems and IoT devices remains a challenge for small and mid-sized organizations—as their budgets can be limited and are often faced with skepticism in terms of achieving measurable returns. Larger companies face challenges scaling visibility solutions across their entire global operations.
Integrating visibility solutions into legacy systems —without creating siloed operations or disrupting existing workflows—is viewed as a persistent issue. Closely related to this is an internal gap in skills, including upskilling staff and training them to be able to handle these new technology requirements. Businesses that do not address these gaps run the risk of falling behind in this competitive market.
Sustainability has taken center stage in the 2025 report—with visibility technology playing a transformative role in advancing sustainability goals across supply chains.
35% of respondents are using visibility tools to track carbon emissions, optimize routes, establish best practices in the circular economy, and reduce fuel use and waste.
49% of respondents stated that carbon tracking enables them to monitor and report their overall carbon footprint, while 35% believe that improving circular economy practices will help when it comes to tracking the lifecycle of materials and products, minimizing waste, and improving resource utilization.
Improvements in sustainability can be viewed as a reflection of both regulatory pressures and market demand—although the challenge of integrating these metrics into visibility systems remains.
Overall, integrating sustainability metrics into real-time visibility systems not only addresses the regulatory pressures, it enhances the reputation of brands—potentially leading to increased customer loyalty which helps companies evolve into market leaders.
Nearly 83% of respondents stated that real-time tracking is between "moderately important" to "extremely important" for them to achieve their sustainability goals—with fuel efficiency being the top priority.
Not very important
Moderately important
Extremely important
When it comes to how businesses today are using their real-time shipment visibility data to make organizational improvements, monitoring carrier performance stood out as the number one application.
This clearly shows that customers value visibility not just as a tool to track shipments, but as a valuable source of ground truth data—to guide operational decision making and strengthen partner relationships.
Customers value visibility not just as a tool to track shipments, but as a valuable source of ground truth data—to guide operational decision making and strengthen partner relationships.
Watch: Learn how Maersk builds insights into supply chains using aggregated, real-time shipment data:
The demand for real-time cargo visibility and tracking through IoT devices has surged, with a 200% increase compared to 2024. Survey results show that 21% of respondents now rely on IoT devices as their primary tracking method, up from just 7% in 2024. Tracking by email continues to lead as the preferred option while tracking via phone calls reduced by 30% compared to 2024.
This indicates that while IoT devices are the fastest-growing tracking technology in terms of adoption rate, businesses are still balancing traditional and emerging tracking technologies and relying on a number of legacy, low-tech methods.
In terms of which key aspects customers find important when it comes to achieving effective shipping visibility, the majority of respondents state that real-time tracking is a key aspect for them—followed by shipment status updates, collaboration, and carrier performance monitoring.
Cargo theft/security remains a key factor in the increased adoption of visibility and tracking technology, with 59% of respondents stating security or loss prevention drives their need for real-time visibility.
And despite "shipment status updates" coming in second on the list of key aspects, when it comes to providing these status updates, shippers and service providers are not seizing the opportunity to differentiate their service by proactively providing shipment visibility or by offering automatic updates to themselves or their customers—the majority revealed they provide updates only upon request, and many others providing only manual updates (email, text, phone).
This is happening despite automated updates and live shipment tracking links being widely available as part of many visibility platforms and services.
This metric ties in directly with real-time damage alerts or deviations as highlighted by the findings below, which expose that roughly 60% of respondents find out about damage to their cargo or deviations only after the cargo arrives —or never at all.
This result highlights the importance of automated updates and alerts. It also reveals a growth opportunity for shippers to learn about these incidents en route through the use of enhanced visibility, which can enable them to stop these problems before they spiral—or potentially prevent them from happening in the first place.
Enhancing customer satisfaction was the biggest benefit of real-time visibility as identified by 62% of the respondents, followed closely by minimizing shipment delays and fees (57%) and improving supply chain collaboration (49%).
When sharing visibility data with partners and collaborators, respondents are inclined to improve collaboration among supply chain partners—with more than 63% confirming that they are either currently sharing data or are considering sharing it.
29% of respondents claim that sharing data is moderately important to them, with roughly 8% stating that sharing data is not important to them at all. Sharing data is especially critical for customers whose sales contracts include the complete end-to-end movement of goods, such as EXW or DDP.
Many companies have fragmented visibility, with more than 37% claiming that while they have visibility into the first and last mile of their shipments, they currently lack any visibility into the mid-mile movement of their cargo.
The survey also reveals regional and industry-specific trends. As per the survey, respondents from North America are focusing more on real-time shipment tracking, respondents from EMEA focus more on sustainability-related tracking, and the APAC region focuses more on cost-efficiency and scalability.
In terms of industries, manufacturers are looking more at predictive analytics and sustainability metrics which provides better control of inventories, while the retail and logistics industries are leaning more towards execution favoring IoT deployment. Rightfully so, the pharmaceutical sector has increased its investment in temperature monitoring and compliance-based tools due to stricter regulatory requirements.
