Automation isn’t just reshaping how goods travel from factories to front doors.

It’s also reshaping the logistics sector’s workforce. This is true of people on the warehouse floor working shoulder-to-shoulder with robots, but it goes all the way up to the c-suite, with increasingly needs for skills like data analytics and risks management.

While skills needed are a reflection of an increasingly tech-driven sector, at the end of the day one of the most important skills is very human: relationships.

“I think the biggest difference between the companies that will win, and those that will lose, will be people,” says Radu Palamariu, Global Head of Supply Chain & Logistics Practice at Alcott Global. “The same types of technologies will be available to everybody… but the ability of teams to act fast will make the difference.”

Listen to Palamariu and Michael Ignatiadis, head of supply chain and logistics solutions for Asia Pacific at JLL, discuss what skills have made, and broken, logistics businesses in these times of extreme disruption.