Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security

| Visibility is not safety. Intelligence is. | Army Signals Intelligence → Global IoT Operations | Berkeley Haas

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

Visibility is not safety. Intelligence is.

The supply chain industry spent a decade and billions of dollars learning to see everything.

It forgot to learn what to do about it.

A thread on the most expensive mistake in modern logistics →

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

Studying executive strategy at Berkeley taught me something uncomfortable: most companies don't have a strategy problem. They have a translation problem. The vision exists. The KPIs exist. What's missing is the 90-day action that connects them. Goals without short-term execution milestones are just corporate poetry.

[2160 @rekt2160]

I’m a 90 year old man trapped in a 40 year old body.

The beautiful @NFTMrsPeach took me to The French Laundry to celebrate the occasion.

A truly once in a lifetime experience

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

6.9% vacancy in refrigerated warehousing is a real estate story.

The story underneath it is an operations story. When companies pre-position temperature-sensitive inventory across surplus facilities to hedge tariff risk, you get more product sitting in more locations with less visibility per site.

Nobody's asking who's monitoring condition compliance across all that newly distributed inventory. The square footage is available. The intelligence layer isn't.

[Benjamin Gordon 🇺🇸 @benjaminhgordon]

Cold storage vacancies have surged to a 20-year high of 6.9%. Smart cold chain leaders like @americold and Lineage Logistics will look for new sources of innovation, growth, and value creation. These could come in several forms, ranging from traditional (new customers) to creative (new services) to unconventional (corporate venture arms).

Where do you see the biggest growth opportunities in cold chain?

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

"Self-optimizing factories: 50% productivity gains with IoT + edge AI + robotics."

Translation: those numbers come from greenfield showrooms built to prove the concept works.

The other 90% of facilities are brownfield. Legacy PLCs that speak 4 different protocols. Sensors bolted onto equipment older than the engineers maintaining it. "Integration" means a guy with a clipboard walking between two systems that don't talk to each other.

I've walked into 200+ facilities across 60 countries. The gap between the conference keynote and the loading dock is where most digital transformation projects go to die.

The real innovation isn't the factory of the future. It's making intelligence work inside the factory of 1987.

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

Unpopular opinion: reshoring doesn't reduce supply chain risk. It relocates it.

Domestic supply chains have better surveillance. Shorter lead times. Familiar regulatory environments.

They also concentrate operational risk into fewer nodes. One port backlog, one rail disruption, one labor action can cascade faster when you don't have geographic diversification absorbing the shock.

I've watched companies exit Asia and move production stateside, then discover their new domestic network has 3 single points of failure they never had before.

The threat model shifts. It doesn't disappear.

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

A distribution company ran into this wall so many times they built a tech company to fix it.

The 3PL pre-sales process hasn't changed since the 90s. Sophisticated WMS inside, cold calls and outdated directories outside. The search tools are evolving faster than the 3PLs marketing through them.

Same pattern in cargo: we invested billions in tracking what happens in transit. Almost nothing in verifying the carrier before the shipment moves.

The unsexy discovery layers are where the real gaps live.

[Martijn Graat @LogisticsMatter]

Walk into any modern warehouse: impressive tech, slick operations.
Now try finding that warehouse as a shipper: cold calls, outdated directories, gut feel.
The internal machinery of logistics is miles ahead of how it gets bought and sold. New episode 👇
https://t.co/VRCyCBQ7lz

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

Digital twins keep failing and nobody wants to say why.
It's not the model. It's the gap between the simulation and the warehouse floor.

Employees don't trust the twin because the twin doesn't reflect what they see every morning. Stale data in, confident predictions out.
https://t.co/FBwVZHtQJL

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

@antgrasso The same logic applies to cargo. Every shipment already carries ownership, handling rules, and custody transfers across networks. The difference is most of that information still lives in PDFs and phone calls instead of programmable infrastructure.

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

@OFOEAC What percentage of containers actually get any physical inspection before clearing? K9 teams are effective but the math doesn't scale to volume. That's where sensor-layer screening starts to matter.

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

@RTSG_News How many warehouses are one disgruntled worker away from total inventory loss? Most facilities invest heavily in external security but almost nothing in the retention and wellbeing signals that prevent threats from inside.

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

Everyone's building AI agents. Nobody's building the leaders who orchestrate them. The CSO of 2027 won't just manage supply chains. They'll orchestrate fleets of AI agents alongside human teams.

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

@GXOLogistics Luxury is where this gets tested first because one missed condition event kills brand perception immediately. The shift from automating tasks to orchestrating decisions only works when the sensor data is live, not lagging half a day behind the shipment.

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

@DCVelocity Jet fuel doubled since February and MESA capacity is still 33% below last year. The rate chart is the symptom. The routing assumptions underneath it are the exposure!

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

George nailed the honest version of this. The show floor says resource-agnostic, the deployment floor says "which provider dropped coverage at the port gate again." Cargo IoT lives in that gap every day. Your sensor doesn't care if it's on cellular or satellite, but the operations team cares a lot when connectivity dies mid-ocean and the data goes stale for 11 days. Resource-agnostic is the right destination. We're just not close yet.

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

The "invisible core collector" framing is the right one. Alex's stat stuck with me too: only about 50% of carriers can be auto-onboarded. That other 50% is where network quality actually gets decided. TMS as the brain, visibility as the eyes and ears. I'd add the network still needs a nose. Something that smells a problem before the shipment moves.

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

Cargo theft losses hit $725 million in 2025. Up 60% in a single year.

Average value per theft: $273,990.

But the real shift isn't in the numbers. A quarter of fleet professionals now say their biggest threat isn't physical. It's strategic. Fictitious pickups. Falsified paperwork. Identity fraud at the carrier level.

The threat evolved from smash-and-grab to supply chain infiltration.

You don't solve infiltration with locks and cameras. You solve it with intelligence: identity verification, behavioral pattern detection, and handoff integrity at every node.
https://t.co/s0tsPkoDgB

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

The IoT patching gap is where this hits supply chain hardest. We have sensors on cargo that can't be updated, legacy warehouse controllers with no security team, and now AI-generated microservices layered on top. Your Unknown No. 3 is our daily reality. Self-healing networks sound great until half your fleet runs firmware from 2019.

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

The $20K unit cost target is the visible metric. The harder problem is the intelligence layer underneath. A Walker-series robot moving automotive parts across global chains needs real-time lane data: right part, right condition, right handoff. Getting the robot cheap is an engineering problem. Getting the data clean enough to trust it is an operations problem.

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

The speed point is what most people miss. While one company waits for tariff clarity, a competitor is already locking in a second supplier and securing terms. By the time conditions are clear, the advantage is gone. Procurement built for control in a stable environment becomes the bottleneck in a volatile one.

[Patrick J Huston | IoT × Supply Chain × Security @PatrickJHuston]

The Gartner stat in here is the one that matters: GenAI saves individual SC workers 4 hours/week, but at the team level it shrinks to 1.5 hours with no improvement in output quality. The gains evaporate at scale. That's not a technology problem. That's a workflow architecture problem.