Insights
For the Road Ahead

Underwriters have stopped pricing trucks and started pricing operations. Commercial auto has run a combined ratio above 100% for years, primary limits are shrinking, and cargo theft losses jumped 60% in a year. Landstar cut 35,000 carriers and renewed its auto liability flat. The pattern is hard to miss.

Everyone spent the summer getting ready for negligent hiring claims after Montgomery. Then a Dallas jury went somewhere else entirely, called a carrier’s driver a borrowed employee of the broker, and returned $604 million. You can’t vet your way out of that one. Here is the analysis, including why it may not survive appeal.

A refinery runs from a control room where every critical process is on one big screen, and the operators act on what moves. Freight has never had that room. EKA’s new Control Center AI delivers about 25 signals, sorted by severity, scoped to your role, with one click to the fix.

CSCMP just put its finger on the paradox: supply chains are more connected than ever and more fragmented than ever. Gartner’s data shows AI is exposing every seam. The fix is one operating environment where the data, the workflows, and now the AI agents all live together.

ATRI’s new cost study says trucking hit a record $2.336 a mile in 2025, in a year when fuel was flat, and freight was soft. Truckload margins came in at 0.4 percent. The same report shows exactly where the recoverable money sits: empty miles, dock time, fuel buying, and the back office.

Nobody signed up to spend the day copying numbers between screens. Bad data and disconnected systems did that to good people. Here is how clean data, one platform, and AI that handles the drudgery enrich the job, and turn screen pushers back into decision-makers.

The market is loud right now, and that noise is hiding a risk the 2026 State of Logistics Report just named: network drift. For a broker, it shows up as a carrier base that quietly decays, one rational decision at a time, until it’s expensive, thin, and exposed. Here is how to see it and stop it.

Halfway through 2026, the freight market finally turned, and rates are climbing. The catch: the same forces lifting rates are lifting costs faster. Here is a mid-year read on the squeeze, for trucking companies and brokers, and on what separates the operators who keep their margins.

I came up in insurance, so I read Montgomery v. Caribe the way an underwriter reads any ruling: as a repricing event. The suits have started. The renewal letters are coming. And the only answer that holds up is to underwrite yourself.