CONNECTIONS 2026 RECAP
THE EVOLVING LOGISTICS AND FREIGHT MARKET LANDSCAPE AUGUST 2026 /// WWW.SMC3.COM
SMC LTL Online Education 3
100% online
NEXT-LEVEL LTL Pricing Intelligence to Optimize Transportation Spend
MAY 2026 EDITORIAL STAFF EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
BETH MALIK
MANAGING EDITOR
HEATHER TOLIVER
CONTRIBUTOR
EMILY HENRY
CONTRIBUTOR
STEPHANNIE O’DONNELL
GRAPHIC DESIGNER
CHELSEA DARLING-MARTIN
SMC3 LOCATIONS
career-focused interactive engaging
MAIN OFFICE 653 LEXINGTON CIRCLE PEACHTREE CITY, GA 30269 800-845-8090 | SMC3.COM
SATELLITE OFFICE 200 HIGH RISE DRIVE SUITE 200 LOUISVILLE, KY 40213 502-962-0900 | SMC3.COM
Understand cost impacts of the recent NMFC SMC³’s BatchMark® XL solution provides pricing ® changes with SMC³’s BatchMark XL solution. It analytics and insights to empower smarter, dataprovides pricing analytics and insights to empower driven decisions anddecisions negotiations for shippersfor and smarter, data-driven and negotiations shippers logistics service providers. logistics and service providers.
TABLE OF CONTENTS FROM THE DESK OF ANDREW SLUSHER
PAGE 3
LOOKING BACK AT CONNECTIONS 2026
PAGE 4
SMC³ IN THE NEWS
PAGE 18
SMC³ TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT
PAGE 28
SMC³ INSIGHTS
PAGE 33
WELCOME NEW CARRIER MEMBERS
PAGE 36
NEW CARRIER & ASSOCIATE MEMBERS
PAGE 37
NEW SMC³ EMPLOYEES
PAGE 38
FACEBOOK: LIKE US AT FACEBOOK.COM/SMC3INC LINKEDIN: FOLLOW US AT SMC3
Expand your professional opportunities with SMC³’s convenient training to increase your knowledge.
X: FOLLOW US @SMC3_INC
sales@smc3.com 800.845.8090 www.smc3.com
YOUTUBE: SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL AT SMC3 WEB: VISIT US AT WWW.SMC3.COM
Learn more about LTL Online Education and certification at SMC³ INSIDER BLOG: SUBSCRIBE AT WWW.SMC3BLOG.COM
smc3.com/onlinelearning
Learn more at smc3.com
THE SMC3 REVIEW IS DISTRIBUTED THREE TIMES PER YEAR TO CARRIER AND ASSOCIATE MEMBERS, CUSTOMERS AND SMC3 STAFF. © 2026 SOUTHERN MOTOR CARRIERS ASSOCIATION, INC. | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
PAGE 1 | SMC3.COM
PAGE 2 | SMC3.COM
Turning Insights Into Action As we move through the second half of 2026, supply chain leaders continue to navigate an environment defined by rapid technological advancement, shifting market dynamics, and evolving customer expectations. Success depends not only on keeping pace with change, but on leveraging innovation, collaboration, and intelligence to make smarter decisions for the future. That spirit of collaboration was on full display at Connections 2026, where freight transportation professionals from across the industry gathered to exchange ideas, discuss challenges, and explore new opportunities. The discussions reinforced several key themes shaping our industry, including artificial intelligence, data-driven decision-making, network optimization, supply chain resilience, and the growing importance of interoperability across transportation ecosystems. You’ll find articles from Connections 2026 in this issue. SMC³ is also proud to announce its win for the TMSA Purpose Award for Sustainability for our LTL Carbon Emissions Calculator. Developed alongside other industry partners, this innovation represents a significant technological advancement in calculating CO2 emissions. This calculator technology enables carriers to report more accurate, shipmentspecific data, instead of company aggregate emissions totals. Contact your sales representative today to learn more. As always, SMC³ remains steadfast in its commitment to excellence. We are dedicated to delivering reliable, flexible, and innovative freight transportation solutions while providing industry-leading education and customer support. By continuing to invest in our customers, our technology, and the future of freight transportation, we look forward to helping the industry meet today’s challenges and seize tomorrow’s opportunities. And be sure to save the date for Jump Start 2027, January 25-27, 2027, at The Waverly Renaissance Hotel in Atlanta. Visit jumpstart.smc3.com and never miss an update.
LOOKING BACK AT CONNECTIONS 2026 LEADERSHIP SERIES & SESSIONS
CONNECTIONS 2026 RECAP
FROM THE DESK OF ANDREW SLUSHER
KEYNOTE More Chat, Less Bot: How Humans Unleash the True Power of AI in Innovation Most organizations are leaving AI value on the table. AI expert Jeremy Utley shares how to unlock more of its potential. Page 4
OUTLOOK Page 7
U.S. Midterm Election: Midterm Uncertainty Puts Business Leaders on Watch
INDUSTRY LEADERSHIP SERIES Page 9
Change Drivers with FedEx Freight’s John Smith
Page 10 Change Drivers with J.B. Hunt’s Dave Bush Page 12 Change Drivers with Revenova’s Chris Wyndham
ANDREW SLUSHER
Page 13 Change Drivers with Lockheed Martin’s Luke Martin
President & CEO | SMC³
MARKET INSIGHT SERIES Page 15 Inside Amazon Supply Chain Services: Technology, Flexibility, and the New Supply Chain Reality Page 17 The New Risks Reshaping Freight Page 19 ACT Freight Forecast - U.S. Rate and Volume Outlook Page 20 Broker Liability Reset: What Happens Next Page 22 The Evolution of AI-Driven Freight Fraud Page 24 Price wins the bid. Service wins the shipper. Page 26 Inside the AI Black Box - The Hidden Risk in Your Data
PAGE 3 | SMC3.COM
PAGE 4 | SMC3.COM
KEYNOTE
JEREMY UTLEY AI Expert and Innovation Leader
MORE CHAT, LESS BOT: HOW HUMANS UNLEASH THE TRUE POWER OF AI IN INNOVATION Jeremy Utley studies why some professionals get far more value from artificial intelligence (AI) than others do. An adjunct professor at Stanford’s School of Engineering and co-author of Ideaflow with Perry Klebahn, he opened Connections 2026 with a keynote built around a single premise: The gap between high and low AI performers is behavioral. Most organizations are getting single-digit value from AI. Utley shared that in a joint Harvard Business School– Wharton study of Boston Consulting Group consultants, workers using AI on standard consulting tasks completed 12% more of them, worked 25% faster, and produced work rated 40% higher in quality than unassisted peers. Yet by Utley’s own estimate, only three to seven percent of people utilizing AI are seeing material, routine productivity gains. The gap between what’s possible and what’s happening, he said, comes down to behavior. That behavior has a name: satisficing, a bias identified by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon—the tendency PAGE 5 | SMC3.COM
to settle for an answer that’s good enough rather than push toward the best one. Utley traced the pattern in research he led across companies in industrial goods, manufacturing, healthcare, insurance, and financial services in the U.S. and Europe. Given an open-ended innovation challenge, teams with AI typically produced a passable idea within minutes and then stopped, while unassisted teams kept arguing and revising toward something sharper. On average, the AI-assisted teams did worse. “Assisted humans mostly settle for mediocre,” Utley said. Most organizations are deriving single-digit percentages of the value AI could deliver. He cited Wade Foster,
During his talk, Utley led attendees step-by-step through better practices with AI.
CEO of Zapier, as one of the more AI-forward executives permission to interview you before it answers. “What you’ll discover is AI models are spectacular at he’s worked with; Foster rated his own company’s transasking insightful questions if you give them permission formation a 2 out of 10. “The more advanced someone is, the more humble to ask,” he said. He pointed to Moderna as a recent success story, they are about where they are,” Utley said. where 7,000 employees are performing at the output Utley’s reverse-prompting method: speak first, level of a 35,000-person organization following CEO Stéphane Bancel’s public commitment to grow through assign a role, then let AI ask the questions. AI rather than headcount. The high performers in Utley’s research treated AI as a thinking partner rather than a search box. He laid out the Treat AI like a management problem. three moves that separated their approach from the deUtley’s larger argument was that most people fault, and attendees tested them live on their own phones. have never approached AI as a management chalFirst, speak instead of typing. Voice input runs five to eight times faster than typing on a phone, Utley said, lenge, like they would with a new hire. The skills reand engages a different part of the brain than a key- quired to get exceptional work out of AI are the same board does. Second, give the AI a defined role. Tell it ones people have spent careers developing with who it is—a McKinsey partner, a Goldman Sachs M&A human teams—onboarding, coaching, giving feedveteran, Kim Scott. Without a role, he said, you’re effec- back, pushing for a better draft. He invoked Henry tively asking what Reddit thinks. Third, which he said Kissinger’s habit of returning every document with produces the most dramatic improvement, give the AI “I think you can do better” before he’d even read it. PAGE 6 | SMC3.COM
Dr. Larry Sabato Founder and Director The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics
KEYNOTE
“The skills required to get exceptional work out of AI are the same ones people have spent careers developing
How the Iran conflict and a 29% economy approval rating are reshaping the environment
with human teams—onboarding, coaching, giving feedback, pushing for a better draft.”
The CEO of a nuclear contractor told him she’d tried the same approach with AI and gotten an exceptional result on the third pass. Rolling out AI access without training people to use it, he said, is like handing car keys to 12-year-olds who’ve never taken driver’s ed and wondering why there are cars in the ditches. He walked the room through the exercise live, then described a woman at a JPMorgan event who told him that in four minutes she’d solved a problem she’d been stuck on for four months. It had never occurred to her to bring that kind of problem into a conversation with AI.
On AI and critical thinking—cognitive offloading versus cognitive surrender Answering whether AI erodes critical thinking, Utley distinguished cognitive offloading and cognitive surrender. Offloading—letting technology handle tasks so humans can focus elsewhere—is something every generation has done and benefited from. Surrender is different. That’s letting AI think for you, and he’s not an advocate. “AI is a mirror,” Utley said. “It appeals to some of our worst instincts, like laziness. It can be damaging. But if your goal is to be sharper, there’s never been a better time.” The sentiment he returned to across the session was simpler. “It’s not what can AI do—it’s what can I do with AI.” PAGE 7 | SMC3.COM
Florida. Sabato cautioned that any broader wave may not appear clearly until after Labor Day, when voters begin paying closer attention. The Senate remains more difficult for Democrats, with North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan and Maine among the races Sabato identified as especially consequential. His broader point was less about any single contest and more about how candidate quality, state dynamics and late-breaking voter sentiment could decide control of the chamber.
MIDTERM UNCERTAINTY PUTS BUSINESS LEADERS ON WATCH Dr. Larry Sabato’s 2026 outlook points to a volatile election cycle shaped by voter frustration, economic pressure, geopolitical conflict and emerging campaign risks. The 2026 midterms are shaping up as a highstakes test of voter frustration, with economic dissatisfaction, war fatigue and an unsettled political environment putting control of Congress in play. Dr. Larry Sabato, founder and director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, returned to Connections to share his outlook on the races, issues and voter signals likely to define the cycle.
The balance of power hinges on a narrow House margin and a tougher Senate map Trump is in his second term, but Sabato framed 2026 as a sixth-year midterm—an environment that has historically punished the incumbent party even when the president remains personally popular. His working prediction: Democrats narrowly take the House, while Republicans narrowly hold the Senate. In the House, Republicans’ small majority leaves little room for error, even with redistricting gains in states such as Texas and
The economy usually decides midterms, except when a war drags on. “This war is the first war in the entire polling era that began in the 1930s that was unpopular from day one,” Sabato said of the Iran conflict, noting disapproval has climbed past 60% as its costs (roughly $100 billion and 13 American lives) have become clearer. Trump’s approval rating on the economy has fallen to 29%. Even if fuel prices fall and inflation cools before Election Day, voters won’t reward Republicans proportionally. “Voters hold grudges. They’re remembering the pain they felt, not the gain they’ve gotten recently.”
Why Sabato trusts ground-level sources over polls, prediction markets, and money Sabato said he is skeptical of prediction markets and campaign spending as definitive signals because both can distort perceptions of momentum. Instead, he places more weight on what voters are saying in communities, well-run focus groups and long-standing state-level sources. “It’s important,” Sabato said of money. “But other things are more important. What people are feeling and thinking and what they’re upset about.”
OUTLOOK
AI’s role in campaigns worries him most of all “Badly and dangerously” is how Sabato described the use of AI in politics this cycle. Campaigns produce synthetic ads using a candidate’s face, gestures, and voice to swing voters identified through polling and focus groups rather than airing them on television (where they’d risk detection). Most go unnoticed, and they work because a single bad impression is enough to make a voter write someone off permanently.
What Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 inaugural address still has to say about polarization Sabato closed with sentiments about Thomas Jefferson, whom he joked he still consults in late-night conversations over French wine. He pointed to Jefferson’s 1801 inaugural address, one of the only speeches he ever gave in person, in which Jefferson reminded the country that despite deep divisions, everyone remained part of the same republic. Sabato paraphrased it for the room. “We are all Democrats. We are all Republicans.” Rhetoric still has force, he said. “You can’t just pop off all the time and say things that upset 10% of the population. Pretty soon you’ve eliminated 90% of the population with quips.” The presence of divisive language won’t change quickly, he added, especially in a Congress that has spent decades redistricting away its competitive seats and any incentive to speak beyond its own primary electorate. For transportation and logistics leaders, the takeaway is straightforward: political volatility, economic pressure and regulatory attention will continue to shape the operating environment well beyond Election Day, making scenario planning and close monitoring essential.
PAGE 8 | SMC3.COM
Using new technology as a lever
INDUSTRY LEADERSHIP SERIES
John Smith President and CEO FedEx Freight
CHANGE DRIVERS WITH FEDEX FREIGHT’S JOHN SMITH Industry titan John Smith, President and CEO at FedEx Freight, sat down with Elisabeth Barna, Founder and Principal at EAB Strategies, for a wide-ranging conversation about where the company has been and where it’s going. The result? A trove of useful insights that logistics companies of all sizes can put to work within their own organizations. Here are the top takeaways.
Perspectives from an industry giant in motion FedEx Freight is at the center of a period of significant change. Having recently spun off into its own entity, Smith is guiding the organization through the early stages of its new growth trajectory. “The number one thing that we focused on was preventing this from impacting our customers or our employees,” he said. “That’s what we’re most proud of. We were able to do this and not let it impact our people.”
PAGE 9 | SMC3.COM
Part of the transition involved bringing on 500 new salespeople and almost 900 new members of the IT team. The IT investments, in particular, reflect a set of new priorities: upgrading and modernizing the company’s technology environment to stay ahead of customer needs. “There’s a huge opportunity in this company to build a fit-for-LTL tech stack that’s cloud-based and platform-based to help the teams run this big organization,” Smith said, emphasizing that FedEx Freight’s reach needs to be matched with a technology-enhanced quality of service. “The speed of our priority service is on average about 40% faster when you compare it to our nearest competitor.” That statistic is a testament to the organization’s dominance in the LTL market: FedEx Freight operates a fleet of 30,000 vehicles and reaches 26,000 doors across virtually every zip code in the country. Not only that, but they also offer dual service—an approach that lends insight into how they achieved their market position and how they intend to maintain it. “Over the years we’ve transformed this network to allow the customer to choose speed or economy. And about 50% of our customers use both, so we know it’s the right thing from a customer perspective.”
Smith was frank about the company’s rocky path toward technological modernization, noting that until recently they were not positioned as well as they should be. “This industry has a lot of great companies in it. From a technology perspective, we knew that over the years we’d become harder and harder to do business with from an LTL perspective. We didn’t keep up with the technology, especially the customer-facing pieces.” That’s all changing. As FedEx Freight charts its course as a discrete entity, it’s doing so with an aggressive emphasis on technology that directly improves outcomes and the customer experience. In Smith’s words, “We really do have an opportunity to focus on the things that are important for customers in the LTL business.” Like many others in the space, Smith sees the transformative power of AI as integral to achieving these improved customer and business outcomes. “Down the road, GenAI is really what’s going to be the true differentiator for everyone in this room,” he said, gesturing to the audience. “That’s what we’re the most excited about: being able to leapfrog from where we’re at with our systems and leverage the speed [AI] creates. We’re already using AI to write the code we need on these new platforms. The time that it has saved for us and the speed it creates is just incredible.”
Never losing sight of the human factor Of course, all the AI investment in the world can’t replace one essential priority: the people that keep everything moving. For example, while he was optimistic about the future of autonomous vehicles, Smith stressed what he saw as the ongoing centrality of human operators. “The technology is there,” he observed, clarifying that the number one goal remains keeping people on the road safe. “But when you think about pickup and delivery, you’re always going to have a driver. You know, airplanes have been able to take off, fly, and land for 30-something years. Have you ever gotten on a plane without a pilot?” Smith has a reputation for putting driver safety first, which is reflected in how FedEx Freight does business. Over the past five years, the organization has reduced preventable accidents by 30%. For Smith, the culture of safety starts with leadership. “If you’re really going to put safety above all, you have to mean it. It starts at the top. Every meeting—even if it’s a Zoom call—we start with a safety message. And that’s just the culture that we’ve developed over the years.”
CHANGE DRIVERS WITH J.B. HUNT’S DAVE BUSH Dave Bush VP – LTL J.B. Hunt
Dave Bush built his career from the ground up in LTL—18 years on the asset carrier side followed by 12 years at large 3PLs, most recently Coyote, before joining J.B. Hunt. He joined a 33,000-person company known for intermodal and dedicated final mile service and was asked to build out a mode it had never prioritized - LTL. Moderated by George Lauriat, editor-in-chief at the American Journal of Transportation, Bush discussed LTL complexity, the importance of customer perception and building lasting relationships.
Why LTL is harder to explain to shippers than it should be Carriers have to optimize across the full movement—pickup execution, linehaul, delivery, accessorial billing. Yet shippers only have one priority. “They want their product shipped timely and intact,” Bush said. “They don’t think much at all about all the underpinnings of what it takes. It requires ongoing dialogue.” LTL is one of the more resilient and consistently performing freight modes, Bush said, but the industry has done a poor job explaining that performance to the people relying on it. His significant other recently entered the industry, and the questions she’s asked him over the past 18 months about practices he’d taken for granted for PAGE 10 | SMC3.COM
INDUSTRY LEADERSHIP SERIES
30 years have shown him how opaque LTL looks from the customer’s side. A lot of people at large brands that have entered the space, including at J.B. Hunt, still aren’t comfortable having basic LTL conversations. That’s still a gap.
How J.B. Hunt builds sticky LTL customer relationships
INDUSTRY LEADERSHIP SERIES
Doing the upfront work to understand
J.B. Hunt’s TMS was built around intermodal and truckload. When Bush arrived, it couldn’t support LTL the way the business needed. The team spent considerable time and budget rebuilding it; the trigger was recognizing that LTL customer service reps were supplementing visibility by manually checking individual carrier websites, which isn’t a scalable function for a 3PL the size of J.B. Hunt. AI is now handling quote generation from emailed requests—the system reads the email, generates the quote, and responds without a human in the loop. Bush calls it speed to quote. AI is also beginning to handle the booking step when customers are ready to proceed. LTL is still in the early innings on AI at scale, Bush said, but the gains on the front end of the workflow are already measurable.
PAGE11 | SMC3.COM
Chris Wyndham CEO Revenova
a customer’s freight,
Doing the upfront work to understand a customer’s patterns, and pain freight, patterns, and pain points is what makes a relapoints is what makes a tionship stick—skip it, and the business doesn’t last. He calls this treating LTL as a process rather than an event. relationship stick—skip The company aims to function as an extension of the customer, understanding not just their needs but their it, and the business customer’s needs—holding regular quarterly business reviews, identifying when provider changes are needed, doesn’t last. and staying current on what the LTL carriers in the program are prioritizing at any given time. “You can’t just set the relationship up and think it’s just going to run in perpetuity,” he said. Pricing strategy must balance contractual rates for consistent lanes with what Bush calls blanket pricing— flexible general rates that give customers options when capacity tightens. A customer with too few providers in their program will be the one left without pickups during Bush’s 2028 goal: Pre-pickup visibility for a crunch. LTL shipments
Why J.B. Hunt had to rebuild its TMS for LTL
Jeff Berman Group News Editor Peerless Media
Bush’s near-term target is pre-pickup visibility. The industry has traditionally treated its work as beginning at pickup, but from the customer’s perspective, the process starts the moment they book the order. He wants to close that window and deliver the kind of pre-movement status updates customers have come to expect from parcel. “When I started in the business, I was taught that really our work didn’t start until we picked up the freight,” he said. “Well, that’s through the carrier’s lens. From the customer perspective, their process started when they booked the order.” Asked what he’d tell someone starting out in LTL, Bush pointed to his own path. He recommended always following a shipment from quote to cash, every step of the way, since it taught him where the dependencies sit and where things actually break.
CHANGE DRIVERS WITH REVENOVA’S CHRIS WYNDHAM After 25 years in retail technology, Chris Wyndham recognized a familiar pattern when he turned his attention to freight. Pricing books in heavy equipment and automotive evolved from monthly publications to weekly updates, then biweekly cycles, and eventually real-time VIN scans. That same compression of pricing cycles is now reshaping transportation logistics. Wyndham, CEO of Revenova, joined Jeff Berman of Logistics Management at Connections 2026 to discuss where AI is delivering real value in freight technology—and where it remains mostly noise.
What’s hype and what’s real about AI in freight, according to Wyndham AI is not a cure-all. It will not hide a broken system or compensate for poor underlying data. In many cases, it does the opposite at first: it exposes the cracks that were already there before it can help address them. The most valuable applications are narrower—and more powerful—than much of the AI marketing suggests. AI can surface insights from data sets too large for people to read, analyze, and act on before the opportunity passes. It can eliminate repeatable tasks. And at its most advanced, it can move beyond recommendations to execution. “AI is quickly becoming not just supplementary to your core system,” Wyndham said. “It’s going to become your core system.”
Four AI use cases already paying off in freight, per Revenova’s customers Revenova customers are seeing the strongest AI adoption in four areas. First is converting inbound emails into structured loads, turning unstructured capacity requests into actionable data without human intervention. Second is instant quoting, where speed can win or lose freight opportunities just as it does in retail. Third is freight-to-capacity matching, an area where AI is already producing measurable ROI. Fourth is reducing manual entry and the cost of moving between disconnected systems by consolidating data from multiple sources into a single hub. That ROI comes from faster responses that win more loads, automation that enables more transactions per employee, and consistency that reduces errors. AI will make mistakes, Wyndham acknowledged, but he urged leaders to respond with the same feedback and grace they would give a new hire. People, he noted, often hold AI to a standard they do not apply to themselves.
The three fears holding back AI adoption in freight A 70% response rate to Revenova’s customer and prospect survey showed how deeply AI anxiety runs in the industry. Three concerns surfaced most often: losing control of business data, fears that AI will replace jobs, and the concern that struck Wyndham hardest— the belief that AI could dehumanize the business. PAGE 12 | SMC3.COM
INDUSTRY LEADERSHIP SERIES
Luke Martin Enterprise Logistics Lead Lockheed Martin
The TMS shift Wyndham sees coming—from system of record to operating system In Wyndham’s view, the clearest structural shift ahead is the TMS evolving from a system of record into an operating system—a platform that acts on data instead of simply storing it. Within three to five years, he believes manual data entry will be nearly gone. The advantage will belong to companies whose AI can execute decisions, not just surface them. The biggest constraint is data sharing. Companies that guard their data too tightly limit what AI can do. Transaction history, communication records, and behavioral patterns are the inputs that help AI anticipate a customer’s need before the customer has to express it. “The best partners in the world are not the ones that are reactionary,” Wyndham said. “They’re the ones that meet a need before you ever even express it.”
PAGE 13 | SMC3.COM
“
There’s a lot of cool tech out there,
ing to connect those parties internally so we can understand what lead times really look like, which helps us unbut it all comes down to taking derstand what the manufacturing cycle is going to be.” Martin emphasized that this internal focus is linked to that and making it work for the a greater imperative facing shippers everywhere: gainbusiness. Don’t just show me the ing better visibility and a firmer understanding of the chain of custody. latest and greatest toys; show When asked by an audience member what keeps him up at night, the issue of visibility immediately rose to me how it’s going to actually work the surface: “It’s really end-to-end visibility. Our customers are inside of our network. pushing us to better understand where the material is at all times and who has access to it at all times. That is one of the bigger focus areas: How can we confidently say, over the lifecycle of a nine-day transit to Australia, this is exactly where it is at all times? That’s our chal- Looking forward: What’s next for logistics? lenge right now.” The word of the day? Flexibility. Much of the conversation focused on the multiple Making targeted investments sources of volatility impacting the logistics industry On that note, Martin noted that visibility was a key and the world at large. Economic uncertainty, geopolitidriver of tech investments. cal conflict, the possibility of a generational tech break“There’s a lot of emerging tech out there for visibili- through—the list goes on. ty that we’re going to try to take advantage of,” he said. Amidst all of this noise, Martin urged flexibility and “We know where our freight is, we know who’s got their resilience. Speaking to the impact of “global disruption” hands on it, we know what the touch points are. I think on Lockheed Martin’s ability to deliver its final product, I see a lot of companies trying to push that as a service he highlighted the contributions of logistics partners in along with their normal track and trace.” navigating near-unprecedented complexity. He was careful to frame up this focus in terms of strat“We have had to remain highly flexible, at times flying egy—catering your tech spend to the on-the-ground shipments into specific regions and transporting them challenges you’re looking to overcome—instead of hype. under armed escort, which adds considerable complexAnd he didn’t shy away from naming the elephant in the ity. We have relied heavily on our freight forwarders and room. providers to develop creative solutions.” “It might not be a popular answer, but I think analytics Ultimately, he cited hands-on creativity as the hallare more important than AI—at least currently, for us.” mark of truly effective supply chain leadership, noting Martin went on to drill down on the importance of un- that future leaders of the industry should get practical derstanding an investment’s likelihood of making a real freight experience before managing teams: impact: “It’s incredibly important that you’ve actually really “I think a lot of companies are trying to push machine planned and dispatched and managed freight. One of learning and AI without understanding the true implica- the gaps I see with some of the younger folks is: You tions of it and how to integrate it into a business’s op- need to understand what moving freight really looks erating model. There’s a lot of cool tech out there, but like. You can always learn the management side of it. it all comes down to taking that and making it work for But if you don’t have that grassroots understanding of the business. Don’t just show me the latest and greatest freight, I think it’s difficult to maximize what you can get toys; show me how it’s going to actually work inside of out of your career.” our network.”
“
On job loss, Wyndham told his team, “I’m never gonna ask you to do more with less. I am gonna ask you to do more with better.” The employees a company has relied on for years remain its competitive advantage. AI’s role is to remove the repetitive work that keeps them from the conversations and decisions that drive revenue.
CHANGE DRIVERS WITH LOCKHEED MARTIN’S LUKE MARTIN Luke Martin, Lockheed Martin’s enterprise logistics lead, sat down with moderator Jeff Berman, group news editor at Peerless Media, for a peek into the company’s priorities, its challenges, and its vision for the future of logistics.
Securing, unifying, and tracking the supply chain Especially in such a complicated, expensive, and high-stakes industry, it matters a great deal how Lockheed Martin manages its supply chain from a strategy perspective. Asked about his strategic priorities, Martin lumped them into one overarching goal: unification. “We’re trying to unify the supply chain from the standpoint of communication and understanding,” he said, noting that this goal directly addressed some of the organizational hurdles they’ve faced in recent memory. “Historically, the procurement activities are kind of in their own bubble, the design and quality activities are in their own bubble, transportation, and so on… We’re try-
PAGE 14 | SMC3.COM
MARKET INSIGHT SERIES
INSIDE AMAZON SUPPLY CHAIN SERVICES: TECHNOLOGY, FLEXIBILITY, AND THE NEW SUPPLY CHAIN REALITY
M
Morgan Roberts spent 13 years in banking and corporate finance before joining Amazon, where she helped build the financial foundation for Amazon’s LTL business and later moved into new service development. Roberts’ background—financial discipline applied to a highly operational industry—set the stage for an insightful look into Amazon’s new LTL service, launched just 19 days earlier than her appearance at Connections 2026.
What Amazon’s 2026 shipper survey reveals about freight risk Roberts opened with data from an Amazon survey conducted at the start of the year. Cost pressure emerged as the top challenge. Particularly noteworthy was the macroeconomic anxiety alongside it: 66% of surveyed businesses said they expect supply chain disruptions to negatively affect them this year. In comparison, 70% said they plan to use technology to address those challenges. Optimism and concern are running in parallel—and that tension is already showing up in mode selection. Businesses are making more deliberate decisions about how freight moves and what it costs. As an example, larger loads that moved by truckload over the past few years are shifting back to LTL.
PAGE 15 | SMC3.COM
BY THE NUMBERS Morgan Roberts Principal, Supply Chain Manager Amazon Freight LTL
The hidden cost tax of managing multiple LTL providers Roberts also shared a finding she said her team references constantly: In Mastio & Company’s research on LTL shippers, ease of doing business is the factor most closely correlated with how customers rank a provider’s overall performance. That theme also appeared in Amazon’s survey, where 69% of enterprise shippers named managing multiple transportation providers as a top operational challenge. The cost is not limited to freight rates; it also includes the time, attention and resources required to manage different processes, tracking systems, labeling formats and invoices across providers. Roberts called it a hidden-cost tax. Amazon experienced this firsthand. As the company grew, it stitched together a patchwork of third-party carriers and found that managing those relationships eventually pulled focus away from its core mission. In response, Amazon built its own network. The lesson Roberts brought to the session: the tax is real, regardless of company size. “We treat their freight like ours,” Roberts said. “Our systems see the demand. They do not know if it’s an Amazon shipment or another external customer.”
Route optimization at scale
66%
Percent of Amazon’s shipping customers who expect supply chain disruptions to negatively affect them this year
70%
Customers who plan to use technology to address those challenges
69%
MARKET INSIGHT SERIES
Roberts gave the room a sense of what optimization means at Amazon’s scale. A 1% improvement in route optimization across the full truckload network represents insignificant cost savings. Solving that manually would require working through 50 duodecillion permutations—a number she compared to the number of water molecules in the Great Lakes. Machine learning accelerates the logistics algorithms behind those decisions, Roberts said, helping Amazon iterate faster, identify behavioral patterns within specific networks and recover from errors more quickly.
Bill of lading processing is Amazon’s next AI priority Customers who named managing multiple transportation providers as a top operational challenge
Inside Amazon’s new LTL offering, launched June 10
Roberts closed with how even small and incremental tech advances can have a big impact in the transportation world. One such example is the bill of lading process. That includes checking documents for accuracy, completeness, dimensional consistency and fraud indicators. It may sit far from the flashier end of AI applications, such as chatbots or generative imagery, but at Amazon’s scale, this is where compounding gains can add up. Her advice to supply chain leaders boiled down to three priorities: understand your core customer before building anything, balance bold ambition with real-world feasibility, and stay with good ideas long enough to create change in an industry that, as she put it, has a real “attachment to the status quo.” “I’m really excited about the boring stuff,” Roberts said. “The make-your-bed stuff. The plain stuff we have to get done.” Roberts’ message was clear: in freight, the biggest opportunities often come from simplifying the operational work that keeps networks moving.
Amazon’s LTL offering is the externalized version of the network Amazon built for its own shipments, now available to businesses of any size. Launched June 10, 2026, the service is built around three items shippers are responding to the most. The first is a unified drop trailer pool: an Amazon Freight trailer staged at customer docks that can accommodate either full truckload or LTL freight, giving operators flexibility without racing against a pickup clock. The second is a dedicated network of LTL pickup and delivery drivers, supporting more reliability. Learn more about Amazon Supply Chain Services at The third is pallet-specific, real-time visibility, with supplychain.amazon.com shipment milestones tracked from pickup through each terminal to delivery. Internally, Roberts said, nothing gets built unless there’s a named customer behind the problem it’s solving.
PAGE 16 | SMC3.COM
MARKET INSIGHT SERIES
THE NEW RISKS RESHAPING FREIGHT
Victoria Kickham Sr. Editor DC Velocity
Insurance costs are climbing with no relief in sight
When a New Hampshire state senator heard Rebecca Brewster present ATRI research showing that lack of bathroom access at customer facilities was keeping women out of trucking, she went back and introduced a bill. It passed. Brewster has spent 34 years in trucking research, most of it at the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), where she serves as president and COO. Her session at Connections 2026, moderated by Victoria Kickham of DC Velocity, moved through litigation, insurance, infrastructure bottlenecks, cargo theft, and workforce—the pressures ATRI’s research says are reshaping the industry’s risk picture this year. Where trucks slow down
ATRI’s most recent litigation study, released in December 2025, tracked the frequency and size of verdicts against the trucking industry. “The size of verdicts against the industry is on the rise,” Brewster said, and what she called “really unsettling” is the trend in the upper half of those awards, which are growing 5.7% annually even as the industry’s crash involvement continues to decline. Three case characteristics drove the largest verdicts, those averaging above $20 million—hours-of-service violations, driver fatigue, and cell phone use. Carriers that keep drivers compliant, rested, and off their phones are in a materially better position when cases go to court. For anything with potential exposure above $5 million, the data favors settling.
PAGE 17 | SMC3.COM
ATRI has been tracking freight congestion using real-time GPS data from hundreds of thousands of trucks for decades. Each year, that data produces the top 100 truck bottleneck list, monitoring 328 locations across the country for how slowly trucks are moving and how many are affected. Texas leads the country with 12 of the top 100 bottlenecks, eight of them in Houston. Chicago claimed the top spot this year, unseating Fort Lee, N.J.—the New Jersey approach to the George Washington Bridge—which had held the No. 1 position for seven consecutive years. The Chicago location has a name: the Hillside Strangler. When the Jane Byrne Interchange in Chicago held the No. 1 spot for three years running, the Illinois governor’s office issued a press release citing ATRI’s data and committed to rebuilding it. After construction was completed, truck speeds at that location improved by nearly 25%. Fort Lee’s traffic improved by 15% after toll booths were removed, and state DOTs continue to use the research to target infrastructure spending.
Women drivers, diesel techs, and the workforce gap Driver shortage and driver retention have dropped out of the overall top 10 concerns—a reflection of the freight recession—but remain on the motor carrier list. The more significant finding from ATRI’s driver demographic research is that women make up just 4.7% of over-the-road drivers, a figure Brewster says has been stuck for years despite data showing women drivers are involved in fewer crashes than their male counterparts. Four states have now introduced or passed legislation requiring customer facilities to provide bathroom access to drivers—a direct response to ATRI research identifying it as a recruitment barrier. The diesel technician shortage drew similar concern; Brewster cited a widely held industry view that the technician gap is doing as much operational damage as the driver shortage. Brewster retires in February 2027. Asked what she’ll miss most, she pointed to moments like the New Hampshire bill—a state passing a law because ATRI’s data made an invisible problem impossible to ignore. “It’s very gratifying for our entire team,” she said. “And the other thing I will miss is the people in this industry. I can’t imagine there is an industry made up of more salt-of-the-earth, wonderful people than the trucking industry.”
FedEx Freight CEO Smith outlines company’s growth strategy post spin-off
“Just a few weeks after the longawaited spin-off of FedEx Freight, the less-thantruckload (LTL) subsidiary of Memphis-based global freight transportation and logistics services provider FedEx, into a separately-traded public company was made official, John Smith, FedEx Freight CEO, provided an update on the company’s status and future direction, at the SMC³ Connections conference.”
Amazon Freight says truckload freight moving to LTL
“Amazon Freight is rushing to seize opportunities created by increased market volatility and rising transportation costs, whether in truckload, lessthan-truckload (LTL), or intermodal freight markets, an Amazon executive said Monday. That’s what shippers tell Amazon they want, Morgan Roberts, principal/supply chain manager for Amazon Freight LTL, told the SMC³ Connections conference.”
SMC³ Named an Inbound Logistics Top 100 Logistics and Supply Chain Technology Provider for 2026
READ MORE
Verdicts are rising as crash rates fall
Cargo theft was for years an issue the industry was reluctant to discuss publicly. Brewster said that changed after a 60 Minutes segment on stolen tequila featuring Guy Fieri aired on a Sunday night; ATRI released its cargo theft study three days later. The study put annual cargo theft costs to the trucking industry alone—not the broader supply chain—at $6.6 billion, roughly $18 million per day. AI is enabling the fraud. When ATRI added AI in trucking to its Top Industry Issues survey, Brewster said she doubted anyone would vote on it. It ranked 10th overall.
READ MORE
Brewster called insurance cost and availability the close cousin to lawsuit abuse reform, the two issues are intertwined enough that separating them is difficult. ATRI’s most recent insurance study found that premium costs climbed 18.6% from 2021 to 2024, outpacing inflation and running counter to the industry’s improving safety record. Cases that breach the $5 million coverage level are still relatively rare,less than 1% of cases in ATRI’s dataset. The more persistent problem is what Brewster calls “death by a thousand cuts”—the smaller cases that accumulate and keep pushing commercial insurance costs up. Carriers are taking higher deductibles to hold premiums down. It isn’t working.
Cargo theft is a $6.6 billion problem
READ MORE
Rebecca Brewster President and COO ATRI
SMC3 IN THE NEWS
“SMC³ has been recognized as one of Inbound Logistics magazine’s Top 100 Logistics and Supply Chain Technology Providers for 2026, earning continued distinction for its leadership and innovation in freight rating and supply chain intelligence solutions. Each year, Inbound Logistics editors select 100 logistics and supply chain technology companies that support and enable enterprise excellence. Drawn from a competitive field of more than 400 applicants, the Top 100 list highlights companies that demonstrate leadership in helping shippers, carriers, and logistics service providers improve efficiency, increase visibility, and drive measurable ROI through technology.“
PAGE 18 | SMC3.COM
MARKET INSIGHT SERIES
Bill Cassidy Sr. Editor – Trucking and Domestic Transportation The Journal of Commerce
Tim Denoyer VP and Sr. Analyst ACT Research
ACT RESEARCH: CAPACITY CONTRACTION IS DRIVING THE 2026 FREIGHT Four events that tightened truckload capacity in 2026 UPCYCLE
market where capacity tightened faster than many shippers expected. One shipper told Cassidy that the ink on their annual truckload contract was still wet when the carrier came back asking to renegotiate.
After four years in a downcycle, the freight market is beginning to turn, according to Tim Denoyer, vice president and senior analyst at ACT Research. Denoyer joined Journal of Commerce editor Bill Cassidy at Connections 2026 to discuss the outlook for U.S. freight rates and volumes.
ACT research’s read on the 2026 freight upcycle: a supply story Truckload spot rates were up 45% year over year as of late June. But the increase is being driven more by shrinking supply than surging demand. Trucking capacity has contracted, while freight demand has not risen enough to explain the rate jump on its own. “Most of the strength is really driven by the supply side,” Denoyer said. “That is not a new phenomenon.” For roughly 18 months, Class 8 tractor builds have run below replacement rate—the roughly 150,000 units per year needed to maintain the existing fleet. ACT Research’s population model estimates that the industry has removed about 40,000 trucks from active highways during that period. That has created a
PAGE 19 | SMC3.COM
Several events tightened capacity in the first half of the year. Winter storms constrained capacity early, and by March, the Iran conflict had pushed diesel prices higher. Those higher fuel costs made older, less fuel-efficient equipment more expensive to operate, pulling additional capacity off the road. Roadcheck in May brought its usual seasonal tightening, while the Supreme Court’s Montgomery ruling on broker liability added another layer of pressure. Truckload contract rates, which typically lag spot rates by about six months and move at roughly half the magnitude, are already up 10% year over year. If that relationship holds, the 40-45% increase in spot rates could translate into a truckload contract rate increase of nearly 20% by year-end.
How EPA emissions rules are freezing truck orders Regulatory uncertainty around new EPA engine emissions standards is adding to the capacity constraint. The rules, scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, 2027, are expected to raise the cost of new trucks. But rulemaking has missed several promised deadlines, with Dec. 31 now the only legally binding one
remaining. Truck manufacturers have been reluctant to ramp up production before the regulation is fully defined, and fleets have been hesitant to place orders without knowing final costs. As a result, even as trucking economics improve, adding capacity back into the market may be more difficult than in previous upcycles.
MARKET INSIGHT SERIES
The driver shortage is back, and the Montgomery ruling is adding pressure ACT Research’s monthly driver availability survey of several dozen fleets shows the driver market tightening again. The index dropped below 40 in March, the same month non-domiciled CDL rules took effect, and it has not meaningfully recovered. Historically, when the index has fallen below 40, truckload rates have accelerated. That pattern appears to be repeating. Used truck dealers are reporting less foot traffic for older trucks, according to Denoyer. At the same time, brokers are becoming more selective about the carriers they use because of increased liability exposure under Montgomery. That is removing some older, less safe trucks from the market, which may improve safety outcomes but also tightens capacity further. Those added costs are likely to be passed through the supply chain.
LTL’s volume inflection point, according to ACT research LTL volumes have declined for four consecutive years, but the market may be nearing an inflection point. The four publicly reporting LTL carriers have turned positive on volumes in recent months. CAS audit data, which lags by a few weeks, was down only 1% year over year in May. Meanwhile, U.S. industrial production is growing at 1-2%, and lean retail inventories could support restocking later this year. Denoyer said LTL carriers may have a structural advantage in a tighter driver market. LTL driving jobs typically involve local routes and allow drivers to be home most nights, making them more attractive than longhaul, one-way truckload jobs. In a market where driver availability remains constrained, that advantage could matter. “I think the LTLs will have a better time overall than the truckload carriers over the next couple years,” he said. “The LTL driving job is just a better job fundamentally.”
BROKER LIABILITY RESET: WHAT HAPPENS NEXT In May 2026, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, ruling that federal law does not preempt state law negligent hiring claims against freight brokers. Brokers who hire a carrier that causes a crash can now be sued in state court over their vetting practices, though liability still has to be proven case by case. To unpack what the ruling means for carrier vetting, capacity, and insurance costs, Connections 2026 hosted a panel moderated by Rebecca Brewster, president and COO at American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI). The panelists included Matt Minton, a vice president at C.H. Robinson and the losing party in the case; Daniel Hoff, vice president of government affairs at the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA); and Jim Mullen, president of the Truckload Carriers Association and a former acting administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). PAGE 20 | SMC3.COM
MARKET INSIGHT SERIES
Rebecca Brewster President and COO ATRI
MARKET INSIGHT SERIES
Matt Minton VP, Carrier Experience C.H. Robinson
How the ruling changed the standard of care for freight brokers Federal preemption of state tort claims was already not the law in more than 30 states. The decision mainly extended that standard nationally, removing a defense that brokers in the remaining jurisdictions had still relied on. “I wouldn’t characterize this as a reinvention of the industry,” Hoff said. “This is really more of a make sure your processes are in place, recharacterize what you’re doing, and just make sure that you continue to do all of the really great things the industry has been doing for decades.” Minton, speaking for the party that lost the case, said C.H. Robinson had robust vetting processes before the ruling and made targeted adjustments after. His main takeaway is that FMCSA data alone no longer counts as a sufficient standard of reasonable care—brokers need more than a single data point.
Capacity and vetting fallout for small carriers and owner-operators Roughly 92 to 93% of carriers operating in the U.S. are unrated, representing close to two million trucks, according to Mullen. That thin safety record is becoming a commercial liability for the operators carrying it. “Brokers are going to gravitate towards motor carriers that have sufficient data they can properly vet,” Mullen said. “That doesn’t bode well for them.” Shippers who use multiple brokers are already asking those brokers what their vetting processes look like, and shippers who contract directly with carriers are being pulled into the same conversation. Mullen does not read the decision as opening broad shipper liability, but he flagged one exception—a shipper that hires a carrier with no operating authority, no insurance, and no vetting process at all would have a hard time defending that choice in court. PAGE 21 | SMC3.COM
Jim Mullen President Truckload Carriers Association
Daniel Hoff VP, Government Affairs TIA
Why FMCSA lacks the data to police carrier safety FMCSA has one employee for every 7,200 regulated trucking companies. The FAA, by comparison, has one employee for every 36 to 37 regulated entities. The agency’s existing safety data systems were not built to serve as the vetting tools the industry now needs, and the agency’s own website warns against using CSA BASICs for carrier selection. Mullen’s position, and TCA’s formal stance, is that FMCSA needs to be modernized before it can be asked to provide the kind of carrier ratings the post-Montgomery environment demands. A more rigorous safety audit before carriers receive operating authority would be a starting point. Right now, a new entrant can file for operating authority, buy a truck, and haul freight for up to 11 months before that audit happens. The industry’s near-term ask of FMCSA is narrower— release the list of high-risk carriers, set a baseline carrier vetting standard brokers can use as a compliance threshold, and provide a pass-or-fail signal that stops short of FMCSA declaring individual carriers safe or unsafe.
Insurance costs after Montgomery, according to TIA’s Daniel Hoff Only Hoff weighed in on this directly, and the panel didn’t reach a shared position on it. He expects the insurance market to shift as a result of the ruling but wouldn’t put numbers on it this early. The shift should become visible, he said, as companies renegotiate coverage and insurers start asking more pointed questions about documented vetting processes. Brewster ended the panel by turning to research. ATRI’s existing crash predictor model ties driver motor vehicle records to future crash likelihood, and she asked whether the industry needs a carrier-level version of the same model. All three panelists said yes—Minton called any research in that space valuable, Hoff called it extraordinarily useful, and Mullen said simply that more data in this space is better.
Justin Hall Chief Commercial Officer Augment
Ryan Joyce CEO GenLogs
double-edged sword of AI in risk FREIGHT FRAUD ENTERS The management THE AI ERA: WHAT LOGISTICS LEADERS NEED TO KNOW Freight fraud has entered a new era, characterized by synthetic identities, AI-driven impersonation, and organized cargo theft networks that exploit the gaps between digital systems and physical reality. To help logistics leaders navigate this new landscape, Connections 2026 facilitated a discussion between two emerging innovators in the AI logistics sector—Justin Hall, co-founder of Augment, and Ryan Joyce, founder and CEO of GenLogs. They explored the risks involved, potential solutions, and how logistics leaders can position themselves for success in the age of AI. Here are the key takeaways.
Fraud is one of the biggest threats facing the industry. Although advancements in digital tracking technology over the past few decades have made strides in combating fraud, its persistence clearly indicates that there is still work to be done. The recent surge in AI-equipped tools has introduced a new layer of complexity. While AI offers enhanced fraud detection capabilities, it also creates new vulnerabilities—such as prompt injections, AI-powered security breaches, and sophisticated AI agents impersonating real customers or employees. Logistics professionals must stay informed about these emerging sources of risk. Managing these escalating risks can be overwhelming. In a landscape where threats rapidly evolve, it’s easy to fall into the trap of a whack-a-mole approach, trying to address every issue without a strategic focus. This can inadvertently create new openings for bad actors. Hall provided some valuable advice: “I think it’s healthy PAGE 22 | SMC3.COM
MARKET INSIGHT SERIES
for everyone to conduct war games and think about threat vectors, both digital and physical. However, you must prioritize these threats, as attacking them all at once can lead to paralysis.” Overcoming this paralysis requires diligent effort and a disciplined approach. Hall suggested combining defensive strategies with offensive ones—aligning risk management efforts with revenue goals. Reducing the impact of fraud can significantly affect the bottom line, just as improving service efficiency or quality can. “You can’t become so focused on defense that you allow your competitors to gain an advantage,” Hall warned. “We all operate on tight margins, and the market ultimately prevails. You must make decisions today that lower your cost to serve and enhance the product for your customer. Ignoring technology that can help you achieve this is a significant issue.”
A new level of height and visibility Both speakers emphasized the AI-enhanced value their products add to shipping and logistics. Hall described Augment’s mission as creating AI teammates for logistics professionals, enabling them to achieve more efficiently. “We aimed to eliminate the tedious, repetitive, and mundane tasks that consume people’s time. AI’s strength lies in its ability to operate around the clock in parallel with human teams. While we can only focus on one task at a time, AI can handle multiple tasks simultaneously.” While Augment improves human efficiency, GenLogs expands visibility across the entire supply chain. Joyce highlighted that GenLogs helps shippers establish a 24/7 “ground truth” for their freight—a real-time digital record that enhances fraud detection and prevents financial losses.
PAGE 23 | SMC3.COM
MARKET INSIGHT SERIES
The key to improved visibility is real-time data. “[GenLogs] is supported by 15 million images of trucks each day,” Joyce noted, showcasing the scale of their operations. “We have strategically placed cameras along major interstates, highways, and freight lanes, continuously collecting information about the trucks that pass.” As trucks navigate interstates and freight lanes, GenLogs gathers comprehensive data—including the truck’s make, model, license plate, DOT number, MC number, cab number, equipment type, and any visible logos or numbers. This information is supplemented with anonymized telematics and connected vehicle data, including Bill of Lading data, freight factoring data, and fuel card data. The full potential of AI in fraud prevention becomes most evident when Hall articulates how these two tools can operate synergistically, marrying 24/7 visibility with 24/7 response. “If it’s 2 a.m. on the Fourth of July and GenLogs captures an image of something on I-80, Augment is awake,” Hall explained. “Augment is attentive, ready to act when that signal arrives.”
AI’s best copilot? Your existing teams As Hall characterized Augment’s AI as a “teammate,” both speakers underscored the collaborative nature of their tools. They described AI as a collaborator, capable of handling and improving tedious tasks, such as monitoring and analysis, allowing humans to concentrate on human-centered activities: exercising judgment, managing priorities, and making decisions. Hall observed that we are still in the early stages of understanding and leveraging AI’s capabilities within the logistics industry.
Kevin Huntsman President Mastio and Company
Eddie Sorg Chief Commercial Officer ArcBest
competition still requires a IN LTL, PRICE WINS THE Price service floor BID—BUT SERVICE KEEPS THE FREIGHT. The final day of Connections 2026 opened with a session focused on a familiar tension in less-thantruckload freight: Shippers say they buy on service, but they often award freight on price. Kevin Huntsman, president of Mastio & Company, joined Eddie Sorg, chief commercial officer of ArcBest, to unpack what drives that contradiction. Mastio asks shippers every year what share of their carrier decision rests on price versus benefits. The answer has barely moved in 20 years: roughly 80 percent price. So, if prices match, what decides the remaining 20 percent?
Sorg said the factors that separate carriers when prices are comparable are the fundamentals: pickup reliability, on-time delivery, careful freight handling, claims resolution and responsive support. A shipper may award freight based on price, but it evaluates the carrier through each of those operational moments. Trust, though, can break faster than it builds. Damage is the top pain point for shippers, and the stakes are rising as more freight moves as custom orders—windows, doors and fabricated components that can take six to eight weeks to remake while a construction crew waits. An ArcBest study of business lost in the first 30 days traced nearly all of it to a failed first opportunity: a missed pickup or a mismatched invoice at the start of the relationship, before any goodwill exists to absorb the mistake.
PAGE 24 | SMC3.COM
MARKET INSIGHT SERIES
A pricing architecture set up to surprise
MARKET INSIGHT SERIES
ing exactly what waits at the dock, and exceptions follow. Differentiation comes from the response. “How do you resolve that issue, and do you do it in a fair way that still enables the customer to get the value they need for their supply chain?” he asked. Listening is central to that response. Understanding what a shipper is trying to accomplish opens paths a rate sheet never will and builds the trust every account depends on. And perhaps no one hears more of that unfiltered customer voice than drivers. Mastio’s findings show the relationship a shipper has with a driver sometimes supersedes the one with their account rep, and Sorg said ABF’s culture is built around that fact. The company calls its drivers “driver salesmen”—they hold customer relationships, flag problems, and feed leads to the sales team. ABF has reinforced that role by sending newer sales reps on driver ride-alongs. A day on a city route shows which doors a trusted driver can open that a rep cannot. And as residential deliveries grow, the company is training drivers to meet consumer doorstep expectations, which differ sharply from dock expectations.
Billing accuracy may sound like table stakes, but in LTL, the rate structure itself can work against it. Base rates, negotiated discounts, freight class disputes and accessorial charges can stack up until the shipper’s expectation and the carrier’s invoice differ. Quotes add another layer. When Sorg started his career, a quote was an estimate; today, shippers treat it as a commitment, and carriers must build quoting tools accurate enough to meet that expectation. ArcBest’s customer experience team studied its most frequent quote-to-invoice mismatches during one year. The causes were often routine. One customer shipped everything to construction sites but never marked ground delivery on the quote. After one conversation, that account reached 100% invoice accuracy. A more structural answer arrived in late 2019, when ArcBest introduced dynamic pricing. The program, Sorg said, “was really built to eliminate most of those surprises.” The model prices each shipment based on network capacity on a given day, in a given lane, for a given customer. As shippers increasingly shop LTL the way travelers shop airfares, carriers need pricing tools that can Service gives pricing conversations substance respond to that reality.
AI takes the first question, people take the next AI has quickly become embedded in carrier operations, largely to improve efficiency. Sorg pushed back on the idea that the technology exists to replace people. Instead, he said, the goal is to “take out the interactions that should not require a human,” freeing employees to focus on higher-value work. Tracking shipments and retrieving documents should be seamless and self-serve. A shipper’s first question rarely needs a person; the second, third and fourth often do. The payoff comes from equipping service teams to resolve those escalations quickly instead of promising a callback.
Resolving issues and elevating the driver’s role Sorg pointed to a fundamental reality of LTL: “If you’ve been in LTL for any length of time, you know there’s going to be issues.” Too much paper still moves through the industry, drivers often arrive at facilities without knowPAGE 25 | SMC3.COM
Sorg returned repeatedly to the connection between service quality and a carrier’s ability to support price increases—rising operating costs alone do not make a compelling commercial argument. A carrier or 3PL earns an increase by demonstrating value first. For 3PLs, Sorg defined that value plainly: “That’s really why customers hire 3PLs—optimize my supply chain, provide me with the best solutions.” A provider that acts as a consultant to the shipper’s supply chain is far better positioned to have a constructive conversation about price. A provider that can’t will eventually hear the question: What am I paying for? The session’s throughline was that price and service should be treated as linked disciplines, not competing priorities. Shippers will continue to scrutinize rates, particularly when they can choose among several qualified providers. Reliable execution, accurate bills, productive relationships and prompt communication give carriers the evidence they need to discuss value with credibility. A rate may open the door. Service determines whether the shipper keeps it open.
INSIDE THE AI BLACK BOX— THE HIDDEN RISK IN YOUR DATA
In the early 2000s, UPS sent Alan Amling to China to roll out a new international product. At facility after facility, he made his pitch and watched heads nod. Back in Atlanta, his boss asked whether everyone bought in or not. Absolutely, Amling reported—every meeting, people nodded along. His boss corrected him: “Alan, when they’re [nodding], they’re saying they understand you. They’re not saying that they agree with you.” Amling, Ph.D., now an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee’s Global Supply Chain Institute, told the story to illustrate a central finding from his research into why so many companies struggle to get ROI from artificial intelligence (AI): Alignment is not agreement. In a conversation moderated by Echo Global Logistics
Zach Jecklin Chief Information Officer Echo Global Logistics
CIO Zach Jecklin, Amling explored that critical difference and argued that the AI black box is “not so much a data problem as it is an organization problem.
An organization problem wearing a technology costume The biggest gap Amling sees in AI adoption is problem definition; companies investing in AI before deciding what problem that AI tool is meant to solve. Often, the organizations his team talks to are ahead of themselves, investing heavily in the technology and lightly in whether the organization can absorb it. Plenty of top leaders can articulate what they want from AI, Amling said; far fewer have changed the deci-
Alan Amling Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Practice UTK Global Supply Chain Institute
PAGE 26 | SMC3.COM
MARKET INSIGHT SERIES sion rights, ownership, and governance underneath it. Companies can point to an organizational chart showing exactly which department develops AI agents and how the work is supposed to flow, but a box on a chart doesn’t produce cooperation. Fostering buy-in and working across the organization, rather than inside a silo, is where much of the breakdown is occurring—and the spending pattern mirrors it. Of every $100 invested in AI, most companies put $90 or more into the technology and $10 in management that helps prepare the organization to incorporate it. Amling’s prescription for a correct split is closer to 50/50.
Dirty data and biased algorithms Where does data go wrong inside logistics AI? Amling’s answer ranged across both the data itself, and the algorithms trained on it. The data problem can start as simply as naming. Is a carrier called the same thing across your systems and functions? Systems develop over time with different requirements, and if entity names don’t reconcile, a company can be double-counting or mismeasuring without noticing. Because of this, Amling argues that data management needs to be a strategic priority. The algorithm problem, though, runs deeper. “They’re all biased, because humans coded it,” Amling tells his students. AI learns from the decisions a company made—not why, and not the alternatives rejected. No logistics company decides quite like another; that context is where differentiation lives, and the AI tool can’t see it.
Islands of automation and the need for a kill switch There is also a speed problem that makes accounting for the above risks even more important. When most companies claim they have a digital supply chain, they have “islands of automation that are connected by humans,” Amling said—and those humans have been the de facto quality control. But as AI agents begin connecting the islands directly, information, including bad information, moves faster than the people who used to catch it. “Where’s your kill switch?” asked Amling. What new processes catch bad data before it perpetuates once the human checkpoint is gone? PAGE 27 | SMC3.COM
And through it all, he added, don’t take your eye off cybersecurity: In the AI era, it becomes “more important, not less important.”
SMC3 TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT
Prepare the workforce for a harder kind of work Amling rejected the comfortable assumption that AI lightens the load overall, and he reached for the smartphone as precedent—a device that promised recovered time and delivered around-the-clock obligation instead. He offered a thought experiment to make a similar point about AI. A leader who makes 50 decisions a day knows the answer to 45 of them from experience. But AI will absorb those 45, leaving the five ambiguous, cross-functional calls to occupy the entire day. Zach Jecklin confirmed the shift from his own early adoption, where automating routine work multiplied his productivity while also concentrating on the more taxing and strategic problems. This change to the work itself is well underway, and both panelists drew the same management conclusion: Careers in logistics have long advanced by knocking out tasks, so leaders rising that way today need grooming for roles that will be far more strategic and tactical than they expect.
CASE STUDY:
BUILDING PRICING CONFIDENCE AND MARKET-READY AGILITY WITH SMC3’S COST INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM How Ward Transport & Logistics leveraged its cost-data infrastructure to sharpen its competitive edge and adapt to a changing LTL market
Looking ahead for LTL Acknowledging that AI is in a vastly more promising place than it was just five years ago, Amling doubled down on the importance of laying the right foundation now. Companies that are aligned at the top are moving fast, and he expects the first-mover advantage to show up starkly in LTL: Within the next three years, he predicted, the industry will visibly separate into companies that invested in both the technology and the organization—and companies that didn’t. “You’re going to see a marked difference between the haves and the have-nots,” Amling stated. But for all that changes with AI, Amling closed on the things that don’t. People support what they help create—push AI onto frontline employees who misunderstand it, and they’ll resist it. The smartest sequence for organizations to follow remains people, process, technology, in that order. “It was the same 20 years ago; it’s the same today.”
PAGE 28 | SMC3.COM
W
Ward Transport & Logistics (Ward), known for its legacy as a leading regional LTL carrier and logistics partner, future-proofed its costing infrastructure with SMC³’s Cost Intelligence System (CIS®), building on a strong internal foundation of cost data to support greater flexibility, visibility and scalability. By evolving the platform behind its costing methodology, Ward is now better positioned to confidently evaluate opportunities, respond more quickly to market changes and proactively expand its network to support new lanes and customer demand.
“
CIS has provided a more accurate, flexible, and easier-to-use platform for pricing decisionmaking—giving us the agility to meet the needs of both our internal teams and our customers. – Bill Ward,CEO
“As our business evolved, maintaining and adapting our internal system required more effort—particularly as we evaluated new network opportunities.” — Bill Ward, CEO
The Challenge
The Solution
Driven by decades of operational discipline and a System challenges included: continued commitment to outstanding service, Ward • Increasing effort: Supporting and adapting the Transport & Logistics has established itself as a resystem meant increasing IT resources, updates spected LTL carrier known for consistency, precision and “fixes” and customer service. • External analysis: Certain analyses required exThat legacy is reinforced by what Ward calls “Ship the ternal evaluation outside of the platform Ward Way,” a philosophy reflected in its approach to • Slower modeling: Modeling new opportunities managing the business and serving customers. was delayed, constrained, and time-intensive For nearly 30 years, Ward relied on its standalone, internally developed costing system. Although Ward’s • Limited flexibility: Expanding operations remodel provided a strong, accurate activity-based founquired greater flexibility in how cost data could be dation for understanding costs, the platform’s role beapplied and analyzed came increasingly difficult to scale and keep pace with Ward needed a solution that could extend its proven evolving business needs. methodology while providing the analytical framework As Ward expanded its network, including new termi- necessary to evaluate opportunities, model potential nals, to pursue strategic growth opportunities, the de- outcomes and support future growth. mands placed on the proprietary system grew as well.
To support this next phase of growth, Ward adopted SMC³’s Cost Intelligence System —extending its proven costing data methodology into an activity-based costing enterprise solution. Implementing CIS, Ward was able to extend its existing cost discipline into a more flexible, transparent, scalable solution, preserving what worked while enabling more advanced, detailed analysis and decisions. In selecting CIS, Ward chose SMC³ as a trusted partner bringing deep industry knowledge and experience along with instant credibility through a proven, widely adopted technology solution.
PAGE 29 | SMC3.COM
“
SMC3 TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT
Extending the Ward Way with SMC3’s Cost Intelligence System CIS Provides: •
Shipment-level costing
•
Flexible cost allocation methods
•
Network modeling capabilities
•
Reduced reliance on internal IT maintenance
•
A widely adopted, industry-proven approach
PAGE 30 | SMC3.COM
SMC3 TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT
The Impact:
Transforming Cost Insight into Confident Business Decisions With SMC3’s CIS, Ward strengthened its ability to assess costs and make daily decisions with greater efficiency, scalability, and confidence across dynamic market conditions.
SMC3 TECHNOLOGY SPOTLIGHT
“The more ingrained CIS becomes in our day-to-day decision-making—at the customer, lane, service center, and company level—the more irreplaceable it becomes to our business.” — Charles Purvis, VP – Pricing
The Bottom Line Faster, More Agile Decision-Making With modeling built directly into the solution, Ward has reduced reliance on manual analysis and enhanced the speed, consistency and efficiency of decision-making. What once required separate, time-intensive analysis is now incorporated into day-to-day business processes, enabling faster, accurate responses to market changes and improving organizational productivity.
Improved Network Visibility Ward can now more easily and efficiently analyze cost allocation and profitability across its network.
Ward didn’t replace its approach—it extended “The Ward Way” with a robust foundation designed for growth. As Ward continues to innovate, the organization is not just reacting to the market—it is positioning ahead of it. “The deeper understanding we now have of our costs will be critical as we navigate changing market conditions and position ourselves for future growth.” — Dave Meyer, EVP
By working with SMC³ and implementing CIS, Ward has: •
Strengthened pricing confidence
•
Improved network visibility
•
Enabled proactive decision-making
•
Positioned itself for future growth
CIS enables Ward to deeply analyze key decisions such as opening new service centers, adjusting coverage areas and refining network strategy — before committing operational resources. This capability equips Ward to make more informed decisions earlier in the process, helping Ward evaluate growth opportunities earlier and with greater confidence.
Stronger Organizational Confidence and Alignment Cost insights are now more transparent and accessible across the organization, improving alignment between pricing, leadership and commercial teams, including: •
Broader understanding of cost and profitability across the business
•
Increased alignment between pricing, operations and leadership
•
More consistent application of cost insights in decision making
“CIS gives us the ability to analyze potential changes before we make them, which is critical in today’s market…” — Charles Purvis, VP – Pricing
PAGE 31 | SMC3.COM
PAGE 32 | SMC3.COM
SMC3 INSIGHTS
WHY LTL’S NEXT FRONTIER IS SHIPMENT-LEVEL EMISSIONS INTELLIGENCE Shipment-level intelligence finally gives carriers precision and turns today’s pressures into a competitive advantage. Authored by Mike Kelley, VP – Membership and Sustainability | SMC³
SMC3 INSIGHTS
LTL is one of the most complex daily transport operations in American commerce — a hub-and-spoke system that is both community-based and network-connected. It resembles an industrial ballet: more than 600,000 shipments are matched with tens of thousands of drivers and equipment assets, moving through a network of nearly 3,300 terminals, choreographed every single day. At its core, LTL is a highly engineered solution, where data serves as the foundation for the remarkable efficiency with which the industry moves the nation’s freight. That same data now sits at the center of Scope 3 emissions reporting. Sustainability has a long track record in LTL. Early efforts to track transport-related emissions relied on industry averages, and that was the right place to start. But over time, it’s created an overreliance on aggregate data and network averages, an institutionalized abstraction that obscures what’s happening across individual shipments. And in a market rewriting what carriers must prove on fuel, data and emissions, that imprecision is no longer affordable. Shipment-level intelligence ends this era of approximation. It finally gives carriers the precision the work has always required and turns today’s pressures into a competitive advantage.
Shipper requirements and Scope 3 are converging on LTL Shipper requirements relating to emissions tracking are becoming more specific, and new regulatory requirements are due to come online next year. What used to feel optional is now a threshold requirement. Third-party sustainability surveys, customer disclosure requests and emissions reporting expectations are no longer side conversations — they’re showing up in quarterly business reviews and becoming part of how shippers evaluate carrier relationships. On the issues where trucking intersects with broader societal interests — safety, security and sustainability chiefly among them — shippers are asking for more data, and they’re asking for it to be verifiable.
PAGE 33 | SMC3.COM
Regulation is accelerating this shift. California’s SB 253 requires large companies doing business in the state to report Scope 1 and 2 emissions, with Scope 3 reporting requirements beginning in 2027. Even if a carrier is based outside California, if it moves freight for a covered shipper whose supply chain touches the state, its transportation activity becomes part of that shipper’s Scope 3 reporting obligation. As other states consider similar requirements, carriers serving national shippers should expect those requests to become more frequent and more detailed. Broad averages don’t hold up well in that environment, and carriers that can walk a shipper through their allocation logic — clearly and consistently — earn trust faster. In tight bid cycles, that matters.
Using the allocation math you already have The LTL industry has run sophisticated activity-based costing for years. Allocating labor, fuel, mileage and trailer time to individual shipments across each leg of their journey is the most reliable way to know the actual cost of moving a thousand-pound shipment through a hub-and-spoke network. Shipment-level emissions reporting leverages that same logic and asks carriers to do what cost-to-serve already requires: trace shared network activity back to individual shipments. Separating city pickup and delivery, cross-dock handling and linehaul movement is how each shipment carries its share. Take a 1,000-pound shipment from Minneapolis to Kansas City, for example. It gets picked up on a city truck, cross-docked at the Minneapolis terminal, loaded onto a linehaul trailer alongside 15 other shipments from different customers, transferred to Kansas City via line-
PAGE 34 | SMC3.COM
WELCOME NEW CARRIER MEMBERS
SMC3 INSIGHTS
haul, then cross-docked and delivered on another city route. In total, that’s three trailers, three tractors and two docks, each requiring a different allocation based on load optimization. An emissions estimate loaded with too many industry default averages falls short of the accuracy required for Scope 3 reporting. Granular freight data lets carriers separate what’s happening on the city side from what’s happening on linehaul, then measure each appropriately. It’s the difference between treating a circuitous pickup-and-delivery run as a single average and understanding which shipments are driving time, fuel and dock activity. It makes it easier to build better outbound plans, and the shipment receives an accurate emissions calculation.
Efficiency and emissions aren’t two problems. They’re one ledger.
Where precision goes next
Peters Brothers Inc.
California Sierra Express, Inc
Shipment-level data is the new operating baseline. But the work of getting more precise doesn’t stop there. Equipment-level intelligence is our next step. Knowing what a specific tractor burns on a specific fuel type on a specific lane changes how carriers operate their fleet and how they buy fuel. And with the industry moving through a transition across biodiesel, renewable diesel, renewable natural gas, hydrogen and electric, carriers who can measure performance across these fuels under real operating conditions on their own networks will make better decisions than those relying on specs and averages. Terminal-level visibility is another logical next step. Current calculations capture city pickup and delivery and linehaul miles, but every shipment also touches a forklift, a dock and the energy that runs them. Those terminal touches may represent a smaller share of the total footprint than linehaul, but are still part of the shipment’s journey, and the next level of precision is learning how to account for them consistently. Years ago, shippers were telling carriers with nearly identical operations that their emissions reports looked nothing alike. It was like the Wild West, with no governing or guiding factor to align carriers on a uniform emissions reporting standard. But the industry eventually came together, established a uniform standard, and the reports improved. That’s how we’ll move forward this time, too. The carriers best positioned today are those that began doing this kind of work before it was required. As the next areas for optimization come into focus, the advantage will go to carriers that keep refining the data, strengthening the methodology, and using both to make better operating decisions.
Peters Brothers Inc. delivers dependable service with a personal touch. The company prioritizes customer service and is committed to delivering products safely, on time, and with the highest level of care. With roots in the trucking industry dating back to 1950, Peters Brothers has built a strong reputation for reliable, on-time service as a trusted refrigerated carrier for time- and temperature-sensitive products.
California Sierra Express is a service-focused carrier committed to delivering excellent freight experience through on-time, damage-free delivery and responsive customer service. The company connects California and Northern Nevada with expedited less-than-truckload (LTL) and full truckload (FTL) transportation services. With locations in seven West Coast cities, California Sierra Express provides local pickup and delivery supported by its linehaul network.
Delays that show up as cost for carriers also show up as emissions for regulators. This is what eventually helped shape the creation of SmartWay. It recognized something that carriers already understood — fuel waste, idle time and inefficient movement show up in both operating costs and emissions. Shipment-level intelligence enables carriers to act on that principle with greater precision. Better load planning, powered by AI technology tools, can help carriers avoid unnecessary moves and preserve road capacity for freight that needs it. The same efficiencies are gained through routing for city pickups and deliveries. When California diesel recently spiked past $7 per gallon, carriers that had invested in backward-compatible alternatives such as bio- and renewable diesel made their operations more resilient. What began as a sustainability effort ended up providing business continuity when it was needed most. Shipment-level intelligence makes those connections This article originally appeared in Supply & Demand visible sooner, showing carriers where cost exposure, Chain Executive on July 29, 2026. fuel use, capacity waste and emissions are driven by the same operational conditions.
PAGE 35 | SMC3.COM
Majewski Transportation, LLC Majewski Transportation is a multi-service logistics provider operating in an array of supply chain solutions. What started as a brokerage in 1991 has now expanded to much more. Led by Jeff Majewski and an experienced management team, the company is driven by strong values, renewed energy, and a passion for delivering the highest quality service to its customers.
All Freight, Inc All Freight USA is a transportation provider focused on helping companies save money by finding trucks quickly and at competitive rates. Backed by experienced leadership, advanced information technology, lean practices, and cost-effective pricing, the company serves as a trusted partner specializing in 3PL services, freight handling, and warehouse management.
TOTE Maritime Alaska, LLC With more than 50 years of service, TOTE Maritime Alaska provides reliable, twice-weekly service between Tacoma and Anchorage. Using custom-built ORCA-Class vessels designed for the Alaska trade, TOTE delivers fast, safe and efficient transportation for a wide range of cargo while maintaining a strong commitment to its customers, communities and environmental stewardship.
Gray Transfer
Gray Transfer provides safe, reliable freight transportation with care and consistency customers expect from a trusted partner. Serving customers from coast to coast, Gray offers a complete range of transportation solutions, including over-the-road, regional, dedicated, intermodal and logistics services. The company is proud to work with customers and partners who value Greenline Logistics Inc. its commitment to excellence in service, safety, growth, Greenline Logistics is a freight carrier built around a team sustainability and social responsibility. of dedicated professionals working together to move freight smarter, safer, and more sustainably. Through its network of autonomous Pods and specialized Cells, the St. Marys Trucking Company company provides seamless logistics solutions across the Founded in 1947, St. Marys Trucking Company is a prination’s busiest lanes. With a culture rooted in account- vately owned carrier based in St. Marys, Ohio, serving ability, innovation, and client-focused service, Greenline customers across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and delivers more than loads—it delivers trust, reliability, and Kentucky with dry van, flatbed, dedicated trucking and freight logistics services. long-term partnerships.
PAGE 36 | SMC3.COM
NEW CARRIER & ASSOCIATE MEMBERS A. T. Kearney, Inc Chicago, IL | Associate Accelerated Global Solutions New Hyde Park, NY | Associate Acme Distribution Centers, Inc. Aurora, CO | Associate Advance Auto Business Support Roanoke, VA | Associate All Freight, Inc Riverside, CA | Carrier ALTA Performance Materials Grandview Heights, OH | Associate ALTANA Management Services GmbH Wesel, NRW | Associate AmerCareRoyal LLC Exton, PA | Associate BASF Coatings LLC Southfield, MI | Associate Batteries Plus, LLC Hartland, WI | Associate Benjamin Moore & Co. Montvale, NJ | Associate BNSF Railway Fort Worth, TX | Associate BreakthroughFuel LLC Green Bay, WI | Associate Brighton-Best International, Inc Long Beach, CA | Associate C.R. Laurence Co., Inc Dallas, TX | Associate California Sierra Express, Inc Reno, NV | Carrier CaptiveAire Systems, Inc. Raleigh, NC | Associate Carolina Tide Logistics LLC Summerfield, NC | Associate Cascades Canada ULC Kingsey Falls, QC | Associate Church & Dwight Co, Inc Ewing, NJ | Associate
Clendenin Brothers Inc. Baltimore, MD | Associate Cra-Z-Art Randolph, NJ | Associate Dober Group Woodridge, IL | Associate DuBois Chemicals Sharonville, OH | Associate enVista, LLC Carmel, IN | Associate Expedite Alliance Inc dba Expedite All Knoxville, TN | Associate Family Dollar Management, LLC Chesapeake, VA | Associate GE Precision Healthcare LLC Waukesha, WI | Associate GE Vernova Operations LLC Cambridge, MA | Associate Genesco, Inc Nashville, TN | Associate Givaudan Flavors Corporation Cincinnati, OH | Associate Gold Eagle Transportation, Inc Doral, FL | Carrier Gray Transfer Louisville, KY | Carrier Greenline Logistics Inc. Markham, IL | Carrier Haier US Appliance Solutions Inc, DBA GE Appliances Louisville, KY | Associate Henkel US Operations Corporation Rocky Hill, CT | Associate Homegrown Family Foods Conover, NC | Associate JBL Logistics LLC dba Northern Logistics Worldwide Grand Rapids, MI | Associate Koryfes SA Orlando, FL | Associate
Lapp USA, Inc Florham Park, NJ | Associate Lineage Transportation, LLC Colton, CA | Associate Majewski Transportation, LLC Houston, TX | Carrier McAlear Group Maumee, OH | Associate McInnes Rolled Rings Erie, PA | Associate Metafora (fka CarrierDirect) Phoenix, AZ | Associate Million Dollar Baby Co. Pico Rivera, CA | Associate Moove NA Distribution King of Prussia, PA | Associate Motion Birmingham, AL | Associate My AI Logistics LLC Fernandina Beach, FL | Associate NDS, Inc Lindsay, CA | Associate Owens & Minor Distribution, Inc. Glen Allen, VA | Associate Peters Brothers Inc. Lenhartsville, PA | Carrier Phibro Animal Health Corporation Quincy, IL | Associate Quanex IG Systems, LLC Cambridge, OH | Associate QXO, Inc. Houston, TX | Associate Ralliant Corporation Raleigh, NC | Associate Razor Logistics
Roosevelt Paper Company Mount Laurel, NJ | Associate Rootz Corp
NEW SMC3 EMPLOYEES Abby Simmavanh | Commercial Strategy Intern
Pittsfield, MA | Associate SAF Logistics
Alia Cooper-Frazier | Sales Support Intern
Saint-Léonard-d’Aston, QC | Associate Sakaem Logistics
Brandon Tate | Software Engineer II
Tucker, GA | Associate Sherwin-Williams Company
Charlie Bailey | Application Support Intern
Cleveland, OH | Associate ShipTime Oakville, ON | Associate SORS Pricing, LLC Fort Smith, AR | Associate Southwire Company, LLC
Bobby Sheppard | Facilities Services Supervisor Caroline Petit | Director, Vertical Sales Chaz Fakour | Sales Support Analyst II Chelsea Darling-Martin | Graphic Designer II Eric Gabrielsen | Director, Vertical Sales Lucia Bernal | Facilities Care Specialist II Luke Cull | Data Analyst II Pearce Strickland | Software Engineer II
Carrollton, GA | Associate St Marys Trucking Company, Inc
Sarthak Dahal | Data Science Intern
Saint Marys, OH | Carrier The Boston Consulting Group, Inc
Tristan Santiago | QA Testing Engineer II
Boston, MA | Associate TOTE Maritime Alaska, LLC Tacoma, WA | Carrier Trace Technologies, Inc, dba Outship AI San Francisco, CA | Associate Trek Bicycle Corporation Waterloo, WI | Associate Tucker Company Worldwide, Inc
Shane Dunn | Manager, Client Success Ty-Kiara Estelow | Dynamics Technical Lead
CHANGING ROLES Andrea Miller | Director, CIS Artie Rottschafer | Facilities Maintenance Tech I Bryan Farris | Sr. Software Engineer Connor McNally | Sales Strategy Lead Earl McGilvray | Product Owner III
Haddonfield, NJ | Associate Vista Advisors
Gabrielle Thomas | AR/Collections Specialist
Bountiful, UT | Associate Volkswagen Group of America, Inc
Jake Mercer | Sr. AI Engineer
Herndon, VA | Associate WB Manufacturing
Kimberly Hinson | Sales Support Analyst II
Thorp, WI | Associate Wenger Corporation
Lorenzo Davis | IT Support Specialist I
Isaiah Gillenwater | Principal Software Engineer Karl Marx-Levi | Sr. Software Engineer Latasha Hayes | Customer Support Analyst II Michayla Walker | Facilities Care Specialist I
Dallas, TX | Associate Redwood Logistics, LLC
Owatonna, MN | Associate Wieland Rolled Products North America, LLC
Chicago, IL | Associate Robert Bosch, LLC
Louisville, KY | Associate Woodward, Inc
Raley Lantrip | Data Developer III
Farmington Hills, MI | Associate
Fort Collins, CO | Associate
Thomas Patterson | Sr. Software Engineer
Nicolas Cole | Director, AI Strategy & Enablement Olena Tishchenko | QA Testing Engineer I Russell Long | Sr. CIS Support Engineer
JANUARY 25-27 THE RENAISSANCE ATLANTA WAVERLY HOTEL ATLANTA, GA
LEARN MORE AT
JUMPSTART.SMC3.COM