AI Optimization and Trucking
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As the latest wave of artificial intelligence begins to make its way into the freight transportation industry, load planning automation has emerged as one of the more promising opportunities for trucking and logistics companies.
AI-automated decision-making already is helping early adopters optimize their day-to-day freight operations by selecting the right loads in the right locations at the right prices to ultimately boost profitability and productivity.
is among the growing number of fleets utilizing this technology to improve its decisions — and its bottom line. Today it makes about 80% of its load acceptance and allocation choices automatically using decision automation platform.
The refrigerated carrier said its revenue per truck per week is up by more than 17%.
“With the market the industry saw last year, that didn’t come from increased rates. It is all from productivity and revenue,” said , vice president of operations at Grand Island Express. What’s more, loaded miles are up, empty miles are down and load count has increased 35%.
At the same time, the fleet’s on-time performance improved by 2 percentage points.
“When you’re already running 94% to 95% on time, that is a big deal,” Albert said.
Leonard’s Express also has turned to Optimal Dynamics and has fully implemented the platform across its over-the-road division. The fleet said it is adopting about 80% of Optimal Dynamics' load planning recommendations.
The theme in our strategy right now is lean, smart and profitable, and technology is a big part of that.
Chris DeMillo, Vice president of information technology for Leonard's Express
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“The theme in our strategy right now is lean, smart and profitable, and technology is a big part of that,” said Chris DeMillo, vice president of information technology for Leonard’s Express, which ranks No. 85 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of the largest for-hire carriers in North America.
Leonard’s Express CEO Kyle Johnson said the decision automation platform has improved velocity and revenue.
“We’re going to get the freight to the right places quicker and be able to execute on it better,” he said, adding that it also helps drive decisions on hauling freight on company assets versus shifting it to its brokerage operations, which accounts for about 40% of the company’s overall revenue.
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“Historically, we bid everything like it might end up on our truck someday,” Johnson said. “Now we’re saying, ‘We’re going after this business for our brokerage.’”
Optimal Dynamics leverages AI to evaluate more than 1,100 variables — including load profitability, driver availability, network balance and a fleet’s goals — to help optimize customers’ operations, explained Daniel Powell, the technology developer’s CEO.
By making impactful and resilient decisions upstream, fleets can better utilize drivers’ available hours and minimize the risk of landing in a location with poor outbound opportunities, which directly affects utilization and profitability.
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Powell said customers usually experience a 17%-24% increase in revenue per truck, and the company won’t sign new customers without completing a proof-of-value process, a highly detailed analysis that identifies potential improvements and the projected ROI.
“Some people are looking to future-proof themselves with technology,” Powell said. “That’s fine, but the large majority need to have a return on investment they can underwrite themselves.”
In addition to using the platform to automate day-to-day decisions, Albert of Grand Island Express also uses Optimal Dynamics' modeling and planning feature to determine how new lanes or an increased presence in a specific market would affect operations.
“Let’s say we want to increase our presence in Chicago. We can start running that to see if it is worth it for us to take more local business versus regional business,” he said. “It makes us a little more confident about where to place growth. We’re going to be leaning on that heavily this year in — hopefully — an improving market.”
Optimal Dynamics constantly evaluates more data points than a human worker could ever consider.
Sometimes the automated decisions seem surprising at first.
“I’ve probably said, ‘Trust the system’ at least 1,000 times,” Albert said. “It might be saying, lay over this driver, don’t look for a load today because the better load is coming tomorrow, or, in some cases, it increases empty miles in order to go after a better load. It can be something I don’t even understand, but sure enough, when you do it, you can see the [reason for the] decision.”
Automating Transactional Freight
Other technology developers also are working to improve decision-making and automate manual processes in the trucking industry.
Axle Logistics has invested in technology from , which automates transactional freight. The system is identifying new opportunities that a human would easily overlook.
“We’ll find an account that an account rep didn’t think was worth pursuing that is actually a great opportunity, but they weren’t making time for it,” said Dylan Dameron, vice president of operations at Axle Logistics, which ranks No. 72 on the TT Top 100 list of the largest logistics companies in North America.
AVRL CEO said his company’s technology automates about 25 million transactional spot quotes a month, drawing on data to optimize real-time pricing and make decisions in milliseconds.
“We tell you where we think there is opportunity that you don’t even know you have,” he said, adding that it became evident early on that the system works best without human intervention. “The human was second-guessing the automation, and they would price incorrectly because there was something that happened in the market and they didn’t know it.”
AVRL pulls data from internal and external sources to help its customers meet their profitability goals.
“We look at where the rate is coming from and where the capacity is coming from at the exact same time to determine where to buy relative to the rest of the market,” Olesen said.
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Goals can vary widely among carriers and 3PLs. While open deck carriers typically seek out higher margin and lower volume freight, other carriers accept higher volume freight at lower margins, Olesen explained.
“My goal is to help them find the floor and the ceiling to run the strategy in which they want to run,” he said.
AVRL works with about 60% of the top 100 3PLs. While 3PLs and carriers typically know their cost to hire capacity or serve a lane, that doesn’t correlate to their ability to execute rates.
“A lot of carriers end up pricing freight relative to the market, but then something gets fumbled, or there was something that was missed. All of a sudden, they lose money on said freight,” Olesen said. “Automation is empowering you to buy better in the market and helping you provide your shipper a better experience.”
AVRL creates decision trees that help companies drive an organizational-level strategy from the top down.
“If you go into a 3PL’s office and they have 500 account reps, Rep 1 doesn’t know what Rep 32 did today,” Olesen said. “If the automation is doing it, you can start to run really complex strategies for your entire organization.”
Axle Logistics has built parameters and thresholds that let the system negotiate incrementally to a point.
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“That’s where it starts getting interesting,” Dameron said.
The speed enabled by automation is also a competitive advantage.
“We’ve seen a lot of accounts where a rep couldn’t get anything going,” he said. “All of a sudden, we can get it quoted before someone else does, and we know it is in faster.”
AVRL has exposed Axle Logistics to new opportunities while helping the company dig its heels into areas where it is already strong.
“If we know we buy a lot in Charlotte, we can do a discount for our customers with automation. We can price more aggressively there, which means we are growing our carrier footprint and our customer footprint intentionally in Charlotte,” Dameron explained. “We target areas and business where we have a strong network.”
Axle Logistics started using AVRL two years ago and now has no interest in winning freight on accident.
“If we’re not strong in it, let’s let someone else take it. We don’t have to be the best on every lane,” Dameron said. “We have a wider footprint of freight … because we’re not quoting emotionally. You remove the human element, and all of a sudden, you’re getting freight you weren’t before.”
The technology also is providing added insights.
“Five to 10 years ago, when quoting spot freight, you’d go in when you had time, and you’d win or lose. You never really had a great idea of how many shipments they put out, if there were repeat lanes in there or the amount of lead time you had,” Dameron said. “For so long in freight, you didn’t know what you didn’t know.”
With AVRL, Axle Logistics has detailed, real-time insights that drive discussions and help convert spot or last-minute shipments into contract lanes, which is always the goal.
“If you’re doing a good job and you’re saving the day where someone somewhere else is failing, that is something you should approach the customer about,” Dameron said.
Grand Island Express, meanwhile, has used Optimal Dynamics' Source product to help optimize its use of load boards.
“We can go to Source, and it will find a load on the load board that will fit our need for that situation and suggest it,” Albert said. “More and more, as a company, we want to view the spot market as a tool, not necessarily a crutch.”
Automated Quoting
ArcBest has developed an automated quoting system for its less-than-truckload and one-way operations that considers the setup of the network and the costs the fleet will incur with a specific shipment.
“It’s very intelligent around how we quote those in-the-moment, transactional shipments that come up,” said Dennis Anderson, ArcBest’s chief innovation officer. “In our earnings call, we talked about earnings improvements. A lot of that has been enabled by automation in one way or another, either from automated load building, automated quoting or other parts of that shipping life cycle.”
Quote requests for truckload and expedited shipments often come in multiple formats, including email. ArcBest uses generative AI to sort through those to create a quote response that someone can check over and send back.
“In some cases, we’ve moved on to where we can automate that completely where there’s no person in the loop,” Anderson said.
ArcBest has invested in AI and automation in other areas as well.
After optimizing routing with AI, the company saved $13.5 million in 2024 by minimizing the number of routes and decreasing miles, which saves on fuel, vehicle wear and maintenance.
“We’ve reached a phase now where it is getting the route set and then being able to react,” Anderson said. “The next phase is learning as the day progresses.”
ArcBest says it saved $13.5 million in 2024 after optimizing routing with AI. (ArcBest)
Proactive notifications and chatbots that use generative AI to retrieve documents and information automatically have reduced ArcBest’s phone and email customer service requests by 20%, increasing efficiency.
Plus, the company recently rolled out Vaux Vision, which uses 3D perception technology to automate freight measurements at the forklift. Operators receive real-time feedback on a tablet, and data is stored securely in the cloud.
“In the LTL space, dimensions are becoming more important for pricing,” Anderson said, adding that more pricing is becoming density-based. “You can’t calculate density without dimensions.”
ArcBest ranks No. 12 on the for-hire TT100 and No. 40 on the logistics TT100.
Workforce Implications
As automation enables companies to do more with less, the amount and type of work performed by back-office staff will likely need to change accordingly.
Minimizing the potential impact on employees has become such a priority that Optimal Dynamics now discusses change management with customers more than the technology itself.
“The human element is actually the most difficult to manage,” Powell said. “When we deploy [Optimal Dynamics], 80% of the roles we deploy to will go away. Our best customers make sure that none of the jobs go away.”
That is the approach Grand Island Express has embraced.
“The one fleet manager that we removed slid into a management-level position and is running Optimal Dynamics all day, every day and planning our entire network,” Albert said.
Companies also must manage driver expectations as they deploy technology.
Albert said Grand Island Express was upfront with drivers from the beginning.
“It allowed us to have half a dozen in-person meetings, put up some podcasts and sit down with drivers one on one to say, ‘The sky is not falling, and we think you’re going to be happy with this,’” he said.
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The top 10% of drivers at Grand Island Express were already very productive, running 3,000 miles or more a week, but the technology implementation helped the next 80%-85% of the company’s drivers increase their miles to the point where they were approaching the same level as the top performers.
“We raised the floor for the network on productivity, which is impressive, so drivers got more miles, and then, in the spirit of on time, they’re also getting home on time when they request home time,” Albert said.
Optimal Dynamics' Powell said fleets can create driver profiles to help match drivers to their ideal loads.
“Ideally, they’re making more revenue, and they’re getting home at a higher cadence,” he said. “The rare ones were sort of sneaking by underutilizing the network, and we point those out.”
Leonard’s Express experienced some initial driver turnover.
“Our driver advocates had to get better about making sure they put the home time requests in, and we had to put in some of those driver preferences,” Johnson said, adding that the system also made drivers more accountable. “We have a $200,000 asset — $300,000 when you throw the trailer in there — that has to have utilization in order for us to be profitable.”
Despite the challenges that sometimes accompany operational changes, companies like Leonard’s Express view automation and AI as essential to their growth.
“If we don’t start making these investments in technology and being more efficient on the administrative and operational side, we’re not going to be competitive on our customers’ business,” Johnson said.
