PP&A designed a two-part voice-of-customer study and ran it in roughly six weeks between December 2025 and February 2026. The qualitative part comprised seven in-depth interviews with logistics and supply chain leaders who use the provider's software in their operations, drawn from third-party logistics, retail, pharmaceutical procurement and freight forwarding in North America and Europe. The interview guide moved from current AI adoption and maturity, through the specific impact of generative AI and large language models, to switching criteria, in-house build appetite and the value of proprietary logistics data.

The quantitative part was an online survey of 94 decision makers at companies running the provider's software, fielded in December 2025 across manufacturing, third-party logistics, retail and e-commerce, warehousing, freight forwarding and carriers, with more than three quarters of respondents in a final or joint decision-making role. The survey measured satisfaction by dimension, expansion intentions, switching intent and drivers, perceived barriers to switching, AI exploration, and awareness and use of the provider's own AI features. PP&A segmented respondents into AI explorers and loyalists, integrated both data sets with desk research on competitor AI roadmaps, and delivered a synthesized report with a module-level risk assessment, three strategic scenarios for the provider and a monitoring framework for the investor.

The study gave the investor a clear near-term verdict: the holding is structurally protected for three to five years, but by economics and lock-in rather than product superiority. Two thirds of surveyed customers named the cost of switching as the main barrier to leaving, followed by deep integration with existing systems, disruption risk, data migration complexity and staff retraining. Customers were broadly satisfied, and almost half expected to add modules within two years. Some 82 percent were exploring AI alternatives, but almost entirely on a casual basis. Only a handful were actively evaluating a replacement, and the factors pushing them were integration challenges, support quality and missing functionality rather than AI itself. Customers saw AI as augmentation, not replacement.

The risk sat in the architecture. The provider had bolted AI features onto individual modules rather than building them across the platform, only 16 percent of customers used those features, and the company trailed cloud-native rivals on predictive capability. The module-level assessment rated customs and trade compliance defensible, transportation management at moderate risk and e-commerce fulfillment vulnerable. It identified AI-native entrants and the large enterprise resource planning vendors as the structural threats, mostly on new deals and expansions rather than through rip-and-replace. PP&A framed the position as a hold with declining optionality and gave the investor near-term, medium-term and inflection indicators to watch, from churn and enterprise win rates to any competitor reaching production-scale agentic AI.

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