Three years ago, KBX Logistics™ was looking for someone to step in and lead transportation. I was the company’s CIO at the time, and I had no intention of applying.
However, my boss at the time challenged me with a simple question: Where could I make the greatest impact on technology adoption at KBX, by leading transportation or by remaining in IT?
I told him to please stop using logic when arguing with me… then I took the job.
Technology determines how well a freight company operates. Access to data determines how well that technology performs. I believed that as the CIO, and I believe it to this day.
It’s how I lead transportation for KBX.
The data I mean is practical and immediate: where a truck is right now, what a lane costs today, which carriers performed best last quarter, and what a customer shipped last month.
My planners have to pull all of it into whatever they work in, our transportation management system or a planning model or a spreadsheet, and pull it fast enough to change a decision before the load moves.
I came into the role with 3 perspectives that shape how I view freight technology today.
- I spent 12 years in operations at a large national truckload carrier, so I know what a carrier can absorb and what a carrier walks away from.
- I spent 11 years as KBX’s CIO, so I know what an integration costs, how critical architecture and security are to viability, and which systems buckle under volume.
- I have spent the last 3 years running transportation, so I am responsible for the outcome.
Making technology work at a managed transportation provider takes all three at once: the carriers who move the freight, the systems that plan it, and the freight itself.
Ignore any one of them, and you’re likely investing in technology that never delivers its promised value.
Not surprisingly, AI comes up in nearly every conversation I have with shippers today. My response usually starts with a question rather than an answer. That being: What problem are we solving?
When people ask about AI, most of them are really asking about AI agents. The conversation moved from large language models to agents in the last year. The biggest mistake I see shippers making is adopting an agent when there is a simpler, less costly way, simply because everyone else is talking about one.
In many cases, a well-designed API, an existing integration, or even a simple automation can solve the problem more efficiently. The goal is not to use AI simply to use AI. The goal is to solve the problem. We recommend picking a tool that fits the problem.
Industry research points to the same reality. This year’s State of Logistics Report added a section on AI in logistics and found adoption remains uneven: real returns in specific, well-defined applications, and a wide gap between companies running AI in core workflows and those still running isolated pilots.
That matches what I see across our customers and our carriers.
None of which makes KBX slow to use the tools. Our teams use AI tools every day for their own tasks because they make work faster and better. Deploying AI inside the products and services our customers rely on is a different decision entirely, and it requires a much higher standard of proof.
Freight adopts proven technology years late, and the delay usually traces to data rather than to the technology.
We ran LTL APIs in 2014, initially through a vendor, and by 2016 we connected directly with every major carrier that could hold a conversation about APIs, putting our shipment status in our own hands. The technology was ready in 2014. Carrier systems caught up years later.
We’ve seen this cycle before.
Blockchain arrived with enormous expectations and faded before achieving widespread adoption. Even today, the industry is still working through basic digitization challenges such as electronic bills of lading.
The Digital LTL Council published a common eBOL standard and asked carriers and 3PLs to sign pledges committing to adopt it by July 2023. Adoption remains incomplete.
Shippers ask me a version of the same question at the start of every engagement: Is our problem the data or the technology?
My answer is always the same: it’s both.
Data and technology create value together, and weaknesses in either one, limits the other.
Technology running on bad data produces confident, wrong answers. Technology also repairs bad data, standardizing formats and filling gaps, but only after the data lands somewhere we can query: a data warehouse, a cloud database, an API endpoint we can call. Data locked inside a system without open access to other systems and tools stays out of reach, and unleverageable.
Carriers are where that gap matters most, and carrier connectivity remains one of the industry’s biggest challenges.
Every transportation decision depends on information moving reliably between shippers, carriers, and technology platforms. Many large carriers still run AS/400 systems, many on prem. Those systems work, but they were built long before anyone expected a 3PL to need ubiquitous access to that data. We need carrier data as reliably as we get customer data, in a form we can hand to a shipper. Closing that gap takes years of integration work, one carrier at a time, and the industry is partway through it.
The cost of that work is what stalls shippers. A midsized shipper can name the tools it wants and still not justify the integration bill for each one, which is how a piecemeal stack turns into a tax on a small team. One TMS handling every need for a midsized shipper is mostly a thing of the past. Specialized systems, integrated behind the scenes, replaced it. KBX carries those integrations for our customers because we built them once and reuse them.
So I took the transportation job because the challenge in freight technology changed.
Buying software is no longer the hard part. Connecting reliable data to the right problem, and then turning that information into better decisions, is where value is created today.
The technology matters. But the decisions that change cost, service, and resilience happen where the freight moves.
I’d rather own and manage those decisions versus merely advising on them.
Tracy Reiss
SVP Transportation
KBX Logistics