Get expert tips, TMS strategies, and freight tech trends for brokers, carriers, and shippers, all in one place.
AI wisdom means understanding that your business doesn’t run on algorithms. It runs on people, relationships, and split-second decisions when everything goes sideways.
The CDL crackdown isn’t going away. But carriers that track the right numbers, do the math, and stay ahead of compliance will thrive while everyone else panics.
The freight market has crashed before and will crash again, but the difference the next time will be whether you’ve learned to roll with the punches or are still waiting to get knocked out.
Carriers are rejecting truckload tenders at about 3 times the rate of 2023 through 2025, because trucks and drivers are leaving the market. The largest carriers have already shifted from adding trucks to getting more from the ones they have. Carriers, brokers, and shippers can apply the same discipline to the trucks and drivers already running.
The No. 1 and No. 3 truck brokerages in the country are becoming one company. On the call announcing the deal, C.H. Robinson’s leadership talked about consolidation, quality, AI, and the Supreme Court’s Montgomery decision. Every carrier, broker, and shipper should read the deal as a statement about risk.
In less than a month this September, 16 trucking companies went to bankruptcy court, from single-truck operators to a carrier that once ran 114 power units. None of the pressures behind them is new. We have written about each one this year, and every carrier still on the road is running against the same list.
Registration data says carriers are entering the market, and every dispatch desk says capacity is tight. Both are correct, because the registered carrier population and the carriers a broker will actually load stopped being the same number. For carriers who stay qualified, the gap is an opening. For carriers who fall off a list, it is freight that stops arriving.
The national average price of on-highway diesel set an all-time record in September, $2.546 a gallon higher than a year earlier, and J.B. Hunt lost 12% of its market value the next day after warning investors about the fuel line. Two carriers running the same lane on the same day pay close to the same posted price, so outperformance does not come from buying diesel cheaper. It comes from buying fewer gallons, in better places, on a plan the driver follows.
A letter to the industry on what AI can do in transportation and what has to be true before it does anything at all. The model is rarely what decides whether a project works. I canceled my own product demo twice over a route, and the reason is the whole argument.
“If Copies of Your Email Are Going to a Stranger, Somebody Is Already Inside.” A thief who has your email password can book loads in your name, change delivery locations, sell the freight, and leave you to explain it to your customer. He does it without going near a truck or a dock. The FBI […]
“They Are Not Stealing Your Trucks. They Are Stealing Your Login.” For most of my career, cybersecurity sat with the technology group. You hired competent people, you bought the tools, and the CEO asked about it once a year. That arrangement is finished, and freight is where the consequences are showing up first. A criminal […]
“Two New Rulings Just Made Double Brokering Your Problem” Two court rulings landed this month, and read together, they extend the same idea that produced the $604 million verdict against C.H. Robinson. Courts are looking past contracts and authorities and asking a simpler question: who actually controlled this load? We covered the borrowed employee theory […]
