How leveraging AI and collaboration can strengthen supply chains for humanitarian aid

Geopolitical tensions, natural disasters, pandemics, port strikes and cyberattacks have exposed the fragility of global supply chains.

In crises, these disruptions cascade through an interconnected world, leaving shippers scrambling to address gaps in supplier, transportation and logistics operations, impairing their ability to deliver products to customers.

The stakes for the humanitarian sector, which relies on these same strained logistics networks, are even higher. Disruptions severely impact fragile supply systems that provide life-saving commodities to those most in need. The lack of global visibility into these risks exacerbates disruptions, leading to delays and higher costs and hindering the collaboration needed to address bottlenecks.

At the same time, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that 305.1 million people will require urgent humanitarian assistance in 2025. While funding coverage declined from over 60% in 2011 down to 43% in 2024 and domestic appetites for foreign aid are decreasing, technology can help address this funding gap.

Regardless of the funding provided in 2025, technology can empower the humanitarian sector to use available resources more effectively by increasing visibility and responsiveness, ultimately reducing resources lost to delays.

To address these concerns, the Global Supply Resilience Initiative was established to promote shared intelligence and visibility to enhance global supply chain resilience.

This pre-competitive consortium of shippers, carriers and technology partners sought to safely anonymize, aggregate and share supply chain data to improve visibility of supply systems and the distribution of critical goods.

In December 2022, a pilot global supply system dashboard was deployed in collaboration with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to provide a near-real-time network view and highlight potential disruptions or bottlenecks across the distribution system, initially focused on life-saving therapeutic foods in West Africa.

The pilot dashboard provided visibility of ongoing congestion and relevant risk-based alerts, enabling earlier awareness of events that could disrupt supply chains. This informed decision-making across UNICEF and improved the delivery of essential goods for those in need.

Despite its early success, the dashboard exposed significant challenges in transforming global supply chains.

While the concept of bringing the world’s supply chain data together for the common good seems straightforward, the sheer volume and variety of data – spanning countless sources and formats – along with a lack of incentives and reluctance to share data poses significant challenges for the private and humanitarian sectors.

Since the global system supply dashboard’s pilot launch in late 2022, however, artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly proliferated across enterprises, promising to impact every function, including supply chain. We see an opportunity for it to play a key role in addressing the challenge of building a common, pre-competitive supply chain platform.

Accenture’s supply chain research shows that AI can help manage the volume and fragmentation of supply chain data while simultaneously increasing the value of data collaboration for participants through new insights.

AI excels at processing and deriving insights from large, diverse datasets, turning complexity into actionable intelligence. It can integrate information from disparate sources, enhancing decision-making with contextualized insights from larger volumes of previously inaccessible data.

In addition to making aggregation and analysis more straightforward on a technical level, new tools are emerging that address the issue of sharing data among competitive commercial entities.

Federated approaches show promise in reducing barriers to data contribution and growth. By allowing AI to extract insights from decentralized data, they safeguard entities’ data privacy and competitive advantage while allowing the humanitarian and commercial sectors to benefit from collective insights across the supply chain.

Furthermore, AI is making data more accessible and usable. Modern AI solutions significantly lower the friction for adoption by enabling intuitive interaction with complex datasets. Users can query data in natural language, obtaining actionable insights across various domains without requiring deep technical expertise or modifying underlying systems.

These tools enable faster reaction times to shocks, reduce downtime and bottlenecks, and ensure essential goods are delivered where needed. Thus, they further strengthen the value proposition of ecosystem-wide data collaboration.

However, while AI can strengthen supply chain resilience and accelerate the delivery of essential aid by addressing particular technical challenges, it is only part of the solution. Ecosystem-wide collaboration is a prerequisite to establishing standards and safeguards for data contributors, while advocacy can help address issues such as fragmented regulatory frameworks.

An impartial platform is needed to align incentives and ensure life-saving supplies reach communities most at risk.

“Harnessing shared intelligence is key to predictive, responsive and resilient supply networks,” iterates Margi Van Gogh, head of Supply Chain and Transport Industry at the World Economic Forum. “To accelerate transformational data exchange ecosystems and deliver the insight necessary for resilient and inclusive supply chain solutions, public-private collaboration will be essential.”

The World Economic Forum has a history of engaging in humanitarian and trade facilitation initiatives. For example, the Forum-initiated Logistics Emergency Team has since 2005 supported rapid disaster responses and the Global Alliance for Trade Facilitation has streamlined processes to ensure that critical goods reach those in need.

In this collaborative spirit, the TradeTech Global Initiative explores how emerging technologies and innovative business models can make trade and supply chains more efficient, resilient and fair for everyone involved. It harnesses technology's transformative power to drive greater impact with fewer resources.

TradeTech’s most recent report, AI for Efficiency, Sustainability and Inclusivity in TradeTech, launched in January 2025, stresses the need for greater stakeholder collaboration to facilitate AI adoption across international trade and maximize its benefits.

Successfully integrating AI in global trade processes could increase real trade growth by 13.6% by 2040. By enabling data collaboration for more actionable insights, AI convergence provides a critical opportunity to strengthen supply chains and empower the humanitarian sector to reach more communities with life-saving essential goods.

Achieving this, however, requires organizations across the public and private sectors to come together to break down data silos and embrace system-wide intelligence. Together, we can drive sustained and resilient growth while ensuring supply chains serve those who need them most.

Contributions to this blog also came from Margi Van Gogh, Head of Supply Chain and Transportation Industry, World Economic Forum.