Above the Fold: Supply Chain Logistics News (March 6, 2025)

By Adrian Gonzalez

I get a lot of invitations to connect on LinkedIn. I don’t have time to review them all, and sometimes they fall through the cracks. But I received a connection request this week that caught my attention because it included the following note:

Dear Adrian,

I asked ChatGPT who I should be following in the Supply Chain industry, and your name came up on the list of “Thought Leaders & Influencers.”

Congratulations on the impact you’re making in the industry! I look forward to watching your interviews.

Best Regards,

PM

Apparently, ChatGPT knows who I am. That’s kinda cool…I think…maybe…is it?

Let me ask ChatGPT.

—-

Here’s the supply chain and logistics news that caught my attention this week:

The Trump Tariffs Whiplash Continues

“President Donald Trump issued exemptions on tariffs for a variety of goods coming into the United States from Mexico and Canada — just two days after he put the sweeping tariffs in place — leaving investors and businesses grappling with the whiplash of his back-and-forth trade policy,” wrote Shannon Pettypiece at NBC News.

What more is there to say? Articles and posts written this past Monday and Tuesday about the tariffs on Canada and Mexico were outdated by Thursday. Whatever I write here today will likely be outdated by this afternoon, or over the weekend, or sometime next week, or never — who really knows?

And that’s the problem. The ongoing changes and uncertainty.

The only winners here are journalists and talking heads who have an endless pipeline of “breaking news” and “updates” to write and talk about.

Trucking companies were winners too, if only for a brief moment. “Rates for cross-border trucking to and from the U.S. jumped in the lead up to President Donald Trump’s new tariffs on Canada and Mexico, as companies scrambled to accelerate shipments ahead of an expected increase in costs,” reported Abhinav Parmar and Lisa Baertlein at Reuters. “It marked a brief moment in the sun for the U.S. trucking industry after a down cycle that has now lasted for nearly three years, the longest and deepest since the global financial crisis.”

It’s like shaking a snow globe. You set it down, watch the glittering snowflakes float down, and then just before the scene settles, you shake it up again. That is what’s happening almost every day with these tariffs and global trade policies. It’s impossible to know what to do until the shaking stops and the scene settles.

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

I’m not able to attend ProMat later this month, but I’m going to bet right now that humanoid robots will win the hype prize.

Last week, Christopher Mimms wrote an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Humanoid Robots Finally Get Real Jobs.” Here’s an excerpt:

Science fiction has long been full of robots that look, move and even think like we do. In the real world humanoid forms have, until very recently, been a nonstarter. Hard to build, expensive, slow and lumbering, they have never made sense compared with the countless other varieties of purpose-built—and vastly more affordable—robots that have multiplied rapidly in the past decade.

That’s changing. As global demand for new kinds of robots has shot up, mass manufacturing and falling costs for components are making them cheaper to produce. Just as important, new kinds of AI—some close kin to the kind that has upended the priorities of tech companies and governments since the debut of ChatGPT—are animating robot bodies in ways that simply weren’t possible even a few years ago.

And this week, Coco Feng at South China Morning Post reports that “UBTech Robotics deploys first humanoid ‘team’ in a car factory.” According to the article:

Hong Kong-listed UBTech Robotics said on Monday that it has completed a test to deploy dozens of its Walker S1 robots in the Zeekr EV factory in the Chinese port city of Ningbo for “multitask” and “multi site” operations.

According to photos and videos provided by UBTech, the human-shaped robots work as a team to complete tasks such as lifting heavy boxes and handling soft materials.

When it comes to humanoid robots, I’m somewhere between Stages 2 & 3 per the Seven Stages of Robot Replacement as defined by Kevin Kelly in a 2021 Wired article titled, “Better Than Human: Why Robots Will — And Must — Take Our Jobs.” Here are the seven stages:

1. A robot/computer cannot possibly do the tasks I do.

[Later.]

2. OK, it can do a lot of them, but it can’t do everything I do.

[Later.]

3. OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when it breaks down, which is often.

[Later.]

4. OK, it operates flawlessly on routine stuff, but I need to train it for new tasks.

[Later.]

5. OK, it can have my old boring job, because it’s obvious that was not a job that humans were meant to do.

[Later.]

6. Wow, now that robots are doing my old job, my new job is much more fun and pays more!

[Later.]

7. I am so glad a robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do now.

I know these humanoid robots will become nimbler and faster in time, but right now, it pains me to watch how slow and awkward they still are compared to humans. They would all fail miserably at warehouse labor standards based on time studies.

What is the goal? For these humanoid robots to reach the same level of ability as human workers? For them to surpass human performance?

You know what would really impress me: If thanks to AI, humanoid robots reach the point where they autonomously decide to unionize and go on strike. Now, that would be something to write about, wouldn’t it?

Until then, get ready for more humanoid robot stories and press releases in the coming weeks.

(For related commentary, see “Robots Will Take Your Job, Not Mine.”)