March's freight market update. Plus: Elon's $25B chip factory in Texas, UNFI closing a Wisconsin DC, Chick-fil-A building its own supply chain, and more.
Fuel is up, trucks are parking, and a two-year broker just got his first real market education.
LA rejections just doubled, flatbed hit $3.74, and 9,500 drivers are off the road. Plus: SoCal theft ring busted, C.H. Robinson cuts headcount, UP CEO fires back, and more.
In just three years, we have moved from an industry that relied heavily on manual phone calls and emails to one where many of us use AI to some extent to support the above.
Happy Hump Day. Today’s feature highlights a new tool from freight AI companies that functions like ChatGPT for freight operations.
Plus:
🍳 What's Cookin' In Freight
💰 Freight Stocks Are Waking Up. According to Craig Fuller, Wall Street is starting to believe the Great Freight Recession may finally be ending. FedEx is up sharply over the past six months and just doubled down on that optimism by teaming up with Advent to acquire Polish parcel-locker giant InPost in a $9.2B deal, giving it direct access to one of Europe’s largest out-of-home delivery networks. The move gives FedEx direct access to one of Europe’s largest out-of-home delivery networks.
🚨 Crackdowns Are Here. Federal and state officials are turning up enforcement on multiple fronts. In Kentucky, five people were charged in a scheme that allegedly took illegal payments to fast-track driver’s licenses for legally present non-U.S. citizens, bypassing testing requirements and producing invalid CDLs. At the same time, the USDOT and FMCSA removed nearly 2,000 drivers and commercial vehicles from service nationwide during January’s Operation SafeDRIVE, citing unqualified drivers, unsafe equipment, and impaired driving.
📈 RXO’s 2025 Earnings. RXO reported a sharp jump in revenue in 2025, with sales up 26% to $5.7B, driven mainly by higher truck brokerage volumes following the Coyote Logistics acquisition and growth in last-mile services. Losses narrowed compared to last year, even as operating costs rose and integration expenses weighed on results. Truck brokerage remains RXO’s largest business, last-mile volumes grew double digits, and the company continued investing heavily in technology to support scale across North America and the U.K. RXO's stock is up 28% YTD.
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The second print edition of FreightCaviar is almost here.
Our Spring 2026 issue focuses on one unlikely place: Chattanooga, Tennessee (Freight Alley). How a mid-size city became the most concentrated freight workforce in the United States, evolving from trucking giants to brokerage empires to today’s freight tech startups. We break down the history, the people, and what comes next.
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These days, a freight broker rep could hardly turn around without hearing AI.
The industry has been flooded with numerous AI companies promising to support operations with inbound and outbound calls, email responses, quoting, posting, and more.
It has been interesting to see firsthand how much venture capital has been invested in these companies since ChatGPT launched in October 2022.
In just three years, we have moved from an industry that relied heavily on manual phone calls and emails to one where many of us use AI to some extent to support the above.
With substantial capital being invested in the AI freight space, the space will continue to evolve rapidly.
On Monday, Augment announced the release of Knowledge Hub within Augie, a "ChatGPT"- like tool dedicated to your company's operations.
As many know, AI relies on information and context to perform its tasks effectively and provide you with the right answers. Augie integrates with all your systems (TMS, email, other tech, etc.) and can answer your questions in detail.
For example: What is my profit margin with customer A? Which customer is the most profitable, and which is the least?
Speaking with FreightCaviar, Augment CEO Harish Abbott described the development:
“This is less about taking tedious work out. It’s about playing offense.”
As Augment CEO Harish Abbott put it, Knowledge Hub is a “shared brain” built to capture how a company actually runs loads, handles exceptions, and makes calls when the SOP isn’t enough.
What is Knowledge Hub?
A freight-native knowledge layer that stitches together:
So an operator can ask a real question.
Abbott said the moment that crystallized the product was when an operator asked Augie, “Is this customer a churn risk?”
The Bet
Make “every operator like a 10x operator,” with judgment available instantly, where the work happens (Teams, Slack, TMS, email, portals).
Abbott also nailed the weird psychology of ops floors: people hesitate to ask “obvious” questions in front of humans. With AI, they just ask.
“You’re taking the tribal knowledge that lives in people’s heads and moving it into a persistent knowledge layer for the organization.” – Harish Abbott, CEO at Augment
The Sneaky Part
When Knowledge Hub doesn’t know the answer, it doesn’t hallucinate and pass it off as confidence.
It routes the question to designated internal experts and then persists the response as institutional knowledge, so the next person doesn’t have to bug the same “four or five people on the floor” everyone pings all day.
And if experts disagree? It escalates. Because three different “company truths” are how you end up with three different service levels.
Check out the full press release on Augment’s Knowledge Hub here.
Pallet Just Fired a Similar Shot
Pallet CEO Sushanth Raman introduced Pallet Core with the most honest operator quote in freight AI this week: “AI works well in our pilot, but it breaks down in production.”
Same thesis, slightly different packaging: an “Enterprise Memory Layer,” reliability guardrails, and a logistics-trained model meant to survive real workflows.
The Gold Rush is Getting Crowded
Abbott’s take: anyone can build a demo. He told us you can build a prototype “in a night.” The hard part is production: uptime, benchmarking, model switching, and the unsexy reality that “It cannot go down, just cannot go down.” That’s why he expects consolidation in the freight AI space.
Which is exactly why we are releasing a FreightCaviar Original about the San Francisco Freight Tech AI “Gold Rush”.
Watch the trailer below and catch the full video tomorrow at 8:00 AM CT on our YouTube channel.
Watch the trailer for our FreightCaviar original, The San Francisco Freight Tech AI “Gold Rush.” Click the video to watch on our site.
Presented by Epay Manager
Cash flow 101: Know your DSO and DTI. Then cut them both down with Epay Manager.
Epay is your back-office automation and payments partner that is an expert in helping you run a smooth back-office and maintain healthy cash flow with a proactive, streamlined, and connected invoicing workflow.
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🌎 Around the Freight Web
📍 Spot Rates Tighten. Dry van spot rates over the past two weeks are noticeably tighter than last year in the Midwest and Northeast, with increased movement also showing up across parts of Texas.
💸 NTG Upgrades Payments. Nolan Transportation Group has joined the Epay Manager network, moving carrier audit, invoicing, and payments to a single system to streamline back-office workflows.
🚫 Capacity Crunch. Truck capacity is extremely tight in Iowa, with tender rejections hitting 42% on freight moving out of Cedar Rapids.
🚨 Truck Safety Tipline. Jim Banks (U.S. Senator, R-IN) announced the launch of the TRUCKSAFE Tipline, urging truckers and industry workers to report unsafe practices and carriers they believe are operating illegally.
🚛 Paper Carriers Everywhere. What looks like a quiet suburb outside Indianapolis is actually packed with trucking companies. Justin Martin says this single cluster has 250+ carriers and is just one of many scattered across the region.
🏁 New CRO at Manifold. Our friend, Trey Griggs, has joined Manifold as Chief Revenue Officer to help brokers and carriers win more spot freight through faster, automated bidding and better, data-driven pricing.
🎣 The FreightCaviar Podcast
Two court cases are shaping the future of freight brokers. Matthew Leffler breaks them down on this week’s podcast.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or watch the interview on YouTube.
Freight Humor
March's freight market update. Plus: Elon's $25B chip factory in Texas, UNFI closing a Wisconsin DC, Chick-fil-A building its own supply chain, and more.
Fuel is up, trucks are parking, and a two-year broker just got his first real market education.
LA rejections just doubled, flatbed hit $3.74, and 9,500 drivers are off the road. Plus: SoCal theft ring busted, C.H. Robinson cuts headcount, UP CEO fires back, and more.
“Strong Solo Sergey” is catching heat on X. Plus: $5 diesel hits truckers, autonomous trucks in Texas, and attorneys go to jail.
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