Athens — Air cargo operators must move beyond digitising individual tasks and instead reconcile the supply chain's fragmented data, Shanmugam Thangavelu, product growth lead at Accenture Cargo, told delegates at the Aviation Connect conference in Athens.

Thangavelu framed the sector's next digital step as connecting information that until now each stakeholder — carriers, forwarders, shippers, customs brokers, ground handlers — has held in its own format and on its own update cycle.

What three forces are driving the change?

Thangavelu identified three pressures simultaneously raising the cost of data silos:

• Shifting trade patterns, with bilateral flows between major economies recalibrating as policy and demand evolve
• Growing capacity entering the global freighter market as belly-hold space returns and additional dedicated freighters come online
• The emergence of AI, with new tools capable of cross-referencing the unstructured and inconsistent records that previously had to be reconciled by hand

The combined effect, he said, is that cargo stakeholders can no longer rely on insular data sets to plan and bill shipments reliably.

What does the China-US ecommerce case show?

Thangavelu used China-US cross-border ecommerce as a worked example. Volumes on the corridor have fallen significantly over the past year, leaving carriers that built networks around previous growth assumptions to rebase capacity plans against a moving demand target.

In a fragmented data environment, each link in the booking chain holds a different view of a shipment's status. Planners relying on the cleanest available signal risk overstating demand on some lanes and understating it on others, while the same mismatches feed into billing disputes and working capital tied up in transit.

Where does AI fit in?

Thangavelu's pitch, according to his remarks, is that AI's near-term value in air cargo lies less in automating single tasks and more in bridging the data silos that have persisted across the supply chain. The technology's appeal rests on its ability to read inconsistent formats, surface discrepancies between carrier, forwarder and customs records, and shorten the time carriers spend resolving disputes.

For airlines, the cost consequences run through dispatch reliability and the time it takes to close a billing disagreement. For forwarders and shippers, the same integrity problems complicate capacity planning and contract performance measurement.

What changes for network planning?

The capacity backdrop Thangavelu referenced points to an industry in which decisions on aircraft assignment, route frequency and freighter deployment increasingly depend on reconciled data from actors that have historically treated shipment information as proprietary. Carriers that close the gap stand to gain a planning edge; those that do not face higher error rates in capacity calls and longer dispute cycles.

What comes next?

Closing on a forward note, Thangavelu said the question for cargo stakeholders is no longer whether to share data, but on what terms and through which shared infrastructure — a debate the shifted trade backdrop and the arrival of accessible AI tooling have now made unavoidable.