FourKites®, the leader in AI-driven supply chain transformation, today announced Loft™, an AI orchestration platform that works across any enterprise system, not just supply chain. At the core of L...
Autore: Business Wire
Sophie, an AI developer agent, turns standard operating procedures into automated workflows that run across enterprise systems. It combines internal company data with external intelligence and records how decisions are made, so organizational knowledge can be reused and improved over time.
LAS VEGAS: FourKites®, the leader in AI-driven supply chain transformation, today announced Loft™, an AI orchestration platform that works across any enterprise system, not just supply chain. At the core of Loft is Sophie, an AI developer agent that enables FourKites to transform its customers’ operational requirements, described in natural language, into production-ready automations in days, eliminating the months of engineering work and perpetual maintenance burden that plague traditional AI deployments.
Unlike AI platforms that work exclusively with data inside an enterprise, Loft combines orchestration across internal systems with real-time external intelligence from the FourKites Intelligent Network - insights from 500,000+ trading partners and millions of daily supply chain events, spanning any ERP, ITSM, TMS, WMS, or CRM system.
The Enterprise AI Problem: Duct Tape, Silos, and Perpetual Engineering Tax
“Most enterprise operations still run on fragmented systems held together by spreadsheets, shared inboxes, and email chains,” said Josh Jewett, operating partner at NewRoad Capital Partners and former CIO of Dollar Tree and Family Dollar. “In that environment, critical decisions don’t live in systems at all - they live in Slack threads and people’s heads. When AI is layered on top of that fragmentation, it can observe problems but can’t reliably act on them. That’s why so many AI initiatives stall. The missing piece isn’t just intelligence, it’s a platform that turns decision logic into durable, reusable workflows that can actually run the business.”
The AI agent explosion promised to solve this. Instead, it created new confusion. Every vendor, from core systems to infrastructure providers to AI startups, pitches the same approach: AI built on internal data, using the same foundational models. The technology is commoditizing faster than anyone can differentiate.
Market data confirms this challenge. According to McKinsey & Company, while 88% of organizations have deployed AI in some function, only 7% have successfully scaled it enterprise-wide. Gartner predicts that 40% of agentic AI projects will be abandoned by 2027 due to complexity and unclear returns.
The real problem emerges after deployment. Managing model drift, evaluating new models, and improving performance creates a perpetual engineering burden. Deloitte reports that 70% of enterprises require more than 12 months to address these post-deployment challenges. Enterprises either build internal teams to maintain agents or become dependent on vendor engineering capacity - neither scales.
Loft: Orchestration Built on External Reality
Loft solves these challenges through three architectural innovations:
Sophie, the AI Developer Agent: Customers describe operational requirements in natural language. Sophie evaluates whether existing workflows can be configured, whether building blocks can be combined, or whether custom code is needed, with FourKites engineers reviewing before deployment. What traditionally required months now happens in days. Sophie continues monitoring and improving performance over time, eliminating the maintenance tax entirely.
Agent Operating Procedures (AOPs): When agents do real work, like fixing PO mismatches, handling supplier issues, balancing warehouse capacity, or routing approvals, Loft keeps a record of why decisions were made and who approved them. Instead of losing that reasoning in Slack or Teams threads, it’s saved and can be reused the next time the same situation arises.
External Intelligence Integration: Loft orchestrates across internal enterprise systems while simultaneously accessing external insights from the FourKites Intelligent Network. When an AI agent needs to decide whether to escalate a supplier delay, it knows the supplier's actual performance history across the network, sees real-time patterns from the supplier's other customers, understands precedents from similar situations, and has context that no internal system provides.
"We didn't build AI features on top of legacy software. We built an AI-native system from the ground up," said Mathew Elenjickal, founder and CEO of FourKites. "When our AI agents do the work, we record how decisions were made - not just what happened, but the context, the prior cases that informed it, and who approved it. That reasoning doesn’t live in your TMS or ERP. It’s scattered across Slack threads, email chains, and people’s heads. Until now."
The Data Moat: Why External Intelligence Matters
The answer to "what makes AI agents actually different?" is data. Specifically, the data that AI agents are trained on and have access to in real-time.
“The real value starts with the network,” said Charles Brennan, Senior Analyst at Nucleus Research. “FourKites’ Intelligent Network provides the external, real-time data foundation that AI and automation depend on. Loft gives enterprises a practical way to operationalize that data by embedding it into governed, repeatable workflows that connect external supply chain conditions directly to internal systems and decisions.”
FourKites has proprietary data outside those four walls. Real-time performance across 500,000+ trading partners in 176 countries, including carriers, suppliers, manufacturers, and 3PLs. Three million daily events across the entire supply chain ecosystem. Intelligence about supplier performance, manufacturing disruptions, capacity constraints, and carrier reliability - patterns that don't exist in any internal system.
Scaling Workflow Automations
Loft is home to FourKites' Digital Workforce - specialized agents like Tracy (logistics execution), Sam (supplier collaboration), and Alan (appointment scheduling) - that are already delivering measurable value at dozens of Fortune 500 firms. Sophie expands this foundation by enabling FourKites to deliver custom automations for any customer’s operational needs across any system.
Built on the FourKites Intelligent Control Tower's three pillars - network data, digital twins, and digital workforce - Loft pulls data from more than 200 TMS providers, ERP systems, and CRM platforms to power automations that span business functions and respond to conditions in real time.
"We are moving enterprises from dashboards that merely track problems to systems that autonomously solve them," said Elenjickal. "The goal isn’t to drop AI into existing silos. It’s to capture the reasoning that lets those systems work together, and to preserve it so each decision makes the next one easier."
Custom agent development through Loft is now available. For more information, visit https://www.fourkites.com/platform/loft/.
About FourKites
FourKites, the leader in AI-driven supply chain transformation for global enterprises and pioneer of real-time visibility, turns supply chain data into automated action. FourKites Intelligent Control Tower® breaks down enterprise silos by creating a real-time digital twin of orders, shipments, inventory and assets. This comprehensive view, combined with AI-powered digital workers, enables companies to prevent disruptions, automate routine tasks and optimize performance across their supply chain. FourKites processes over 3.2 million supply chain events daily - from purchase orders to final delivery - helping 1,600-plus global brands prevent disruptions, make faster decisions and move from reactive tracking to proactive supply chain orchestration. For more information, visit www.fourkites.com.
Fonte: Business Wire