Remember when blockchain was going to revolutionize logistics?
Sat through the demos. Nothing shipped.
AI in freight tech is running the same playbook. “AI-powered” on every homepage, a chatbot on every dashboard. Smoke and mirrors.
But here’s what everyone has backwards: they’re evaluating AI at the wrong layer.
The question isn’t what AI does in your wheelhouse
It’s what AI does for the developers who support your wheelhouse.
I’ve spent 3 years building our TMS with AI properly in the loop. Feature delivery is up 5x. Hard numbers, not vibes.
And the gain didn’t come from AI writing code faster. It came from killing the #1 time suck in software: communication between the people who know the business and the people who build it.
The real cost of every build was translation
For years, shipping a feature meant teaching developers the freight business — rating logic, accessorials, carrier quirks — just so they could catch edge cases. That education was the real cost of every build.
Now the person who knows the business builds what they want. I write the working spec, edge cases already encoded. My devs do what they’re actually elite at: scalability, quality, QA.
Nobody translates anymore. Everybody builds.
Skip the demo. Ask one question instead.
Ask your software vendor: “How has AI changed how fast you deliver?”
If they can’t answer with a number, the AI is on the homepage — not in the company.