ABBYY survey reveals nearly a third of T&L businesses lack AI governance

New research commissioned by ABBYY reveals the major challenges faced by Transport & Logistics (T&L) businesses trying to integrate sophisticated Generative AI (GenAI) technology – prompting the use of other AI to improve outputs.

The survey, conducted by Opinium, revealed that nearly a third (30%) of businesses in the T&L sector lacked an AI policy or governance. Managers also complained that they found training harder than expected (30%) and found it difficult to integrate with business processes (25%).

In response, many business leaders addressed these challenges by combining other technologies, with 36% turning to process intelligence, 27% to RAG, and 25% to AI agents to improve outputs, according to the 2025 ABBYY State of Intelligent Automation Report: GenAI Confessions. More than half (54%) also invested in staff training.

Adding these technologies contributed to 100% of T&L respondents ultimately being happy with their GenAI tools. Half (50%) saw cost savings, while 45% saw outputs more aligned to business goals and the same proportion saw better integration into existing systems.

This is reflected in planned investment in AI for 2026, with the average budget expected to increase by 22%. Goals for GenAI use include reducing boring tasks (21%), collecting and monetizing data to unlock new revenue streams, and staying ahead of competitors (both 20%) while the most cited goal was to automate tasks to speed up business processes (38%)

Evaluate processes before investing in GenAI, says ABBYY

“Businesses are spending money on GenAI tools that promise more than they can provide. In some cases, they don’t even need it,” said Maxime Vermeir, Senior Director of AI Strategy at ABBYY. “Before moving forward with leveraging GenAI tools or agentic AI, companies need to first evaluate their current processes and create a visibility map of their workflow with data analytics tools such as process intelligence.”

Vermeir continued: “When training models prove more difficult than expected, pre-trained, purpose-built AI turns out to be the right solution. We’ve helped customers like a global fast-food chain improve the extraction of data from thousands of lease agreements by 82% by using document AI to improve GenAI outputs.”

Staff potentially putting businesses at risk with unauthorized use of GenAI

The survey also revealed that more than a third (36%) of T&L leaders admit that a driving factor for introducing GenAI was that employees were already using it on a Bring Your Own Software (BYOS) basis for personal productivity – which could impact security concerns over ‘Shadow AI’.

Generally, leaders say staff are optimistic about GenAI. They say employees feel the technology makes them look “smarter and more professional” (37%), while nearly three fifths (59%) say it reduces employees’ workload, 65% said it improved collaboration, and 41% said it supports creativity and innovation.

Ulf Persson, CEO of ABBYY, comments, “GenAI is creating remarkable opportunities to reimagine how work gets done, which is rightfully generating a great deal of excitement. However, ‘shadow AI’, when individuals use commonly available tools like ChatGPT, Grok, or Perplexity without oversight at work, potentially raises serious data privacy and compliance concerns. The corporate benefits of GenAI’s potential is truly unlocked when leaders drive secure, strategic adoption with risk management as a priority.”

Other key findings from the report

• Use of GenAI is widespread – three quarters (75%) of firms use the tools across most or some of the business.
• 64% use GenAI for automating document business processes (such as accounts payable), 57% for customer service, and 54% for employee productivity.
• When considering improvements to GenAI, top of T&L firms’ wish-list was that it knows which processes could be improved and improve them (32%). This was followed by GenAI asking additional questions to provide a more accurate result (27%), and that it recognizes any business system when deployed (27%).