Freight brokerages are being inundated with promises from technology providers of “fully autonomous” operations. But when you wade through the AI hype, the reality is that what brokers actually want from their software is speed, accuracy, consistency, and better customer service.
AI shouldn’t replace freight brokers — it should empower them.
The Foundational Truth: Freight Runs on Trust, Judgment, and Relationships
Moving freight is not a math problem. Freight brokering has always been a relationship-driven business. Those relationships can be irrevocably damaged when brokers let customers down — because of pricing errors, lack of communication, service failures, you name it.
To garner understanding from customers that unforeseen stuff does happen, it’s important that a human conveys scheduling problems, delivery delays, route closures, or whatever the issue is — not a bot. AI cannot replicate accountability or build trust with your customers.
The Myth of the Fully Autonomous Brokerage
You’ve probably heard the sales pitches. “You’ll never build another load.” “AI will negotiate for you.” “Voice bots can replace your team.”
Remember Quibi? Probably not. The streaming platform for mobile devices was launched in April 2020, right smack in the midst of the COVID pandemic, when people were at home binge-watching shows on their big TV screens.
A case study on Quibi’s demise noted that “a product’s success depends on its alignment with user needs and behaviors in real-world scenarios.”
The words “user needs” are key. Many freight broker software vendors fail to take those needs into consideration when making their hard sales pitches. And often, those vendor claims fall apart in real operations when things hit the fan. Can the data be trusted? What’s the risk to margins? What happens to customer relationships when they can’t connect with a human to handle problems?
“Even in a professional context, we crave authenticity,” Drumkit CEO Dhruv Gupta told host Chris Jolly on an episode of The Freight Coach podcast. “We crave wanting to be surrounded by actual people, and I think when you have AI talking to AI, one of two things can happen. Either that entire transaction becomes like an API transaction, where that part becomes so efficient, as if it’s one click and done, and you don’t need to think about it, or it could go the other way, that AI starts making decisions that you didn’t agree to or don’t understand, like negotiation decisions, for example, or timing or whatever it is, and now you’re stuck. And now you have to rip and replace because you were going for an efficiency gain, but you don’t have any way to intervene or understand what’s going on in that conversation.”
The Right Boundary: What AI Should Handle
AI excels at performing actions, not making decisions. AI can be great when used for such tasks as:
- Reading and extracting data from emails.
- Prefilling quote responses and forms.
- Scheduling appointments.
- Tracking shipments and alerting on anomalies.
- Updating the TMS automatically.
Simply put, AI can remove the busywork from a freight broker’s day, but humans should remain in control. Both brokers — and their customers — gain time, clarity, and consistency.
Importantly, AI should not remove all of a human freight broker’s work. Sure, there are parts of a freight broker’s day that no one would classify as “fun,” but AI should not be implemented with the goal of making a freight broker’s job all laughs and giggles. Chadd Olesen, who works in the automation space, sparked a lively LinkedIn discussion when he lamented “a future where we automate all the unglamorous roles, the ones where people learn how things work. Society calls it efficiency, but in reality, it deletes all training and mentorship.
“Those early jobs are where you grow, where you learn consequences, where you understand how systems actually behave. If we erase that layer, we don’t get liberated workers. We get future leaders who have never experienced friction.”
AI, of course, can help reduce friction, but in today’s world, and for the foreseeable future, it’s essential that humans continue to have the ability to learn and, yes, make mistakes and experience the consequences of those mistakes. A fully autonomous freight brokerage would be no fun at all.
Where AI Should NOT Operate (Yet)
A painful lesson for the Quibi team was that timing really does matter. And while AI undoubtedly will assume more tasks in the future, the technology isn’t quite there yet. In freight brokerage, AI should not be trusted for:
- Price negotiations. There’s just too much margin risk to take negotiations out of human hands.
- Final decision-making. There can be liability issues when a machine makes decisions rather than a human.
- Complex exception management, which requires judgment.
- Customer conflict or issue escalation requires empathy.
- Carrier evaluation without human verification. There is a safety risk when leaving carrier vetting to AI. In these days of CDL crackdowns, there is also the risk of getting into hot water with the federal government.
Think about it, human. AI lacks contextual nuance, moral accountability, and lived experience. AI can’t be you, the human freight broker winning loads, handling whatever disruptions are thrown your way, and keeping customers happy.
The Infrastructure Problem: Why Most AI Fails in Freight
Vendors pitching AI solutions try to dazzle freight brokers with bells and whistles, but AI really is only as good as the data that supports it. At Drumkit, we don’t do song-and-dance performances before prospective customers. We don’t need the razzle-dazzle. We’re all about:
- Building deep integrations.
- Normalizing incoming data.
- Creating “connective tissue” between systems.
- Prioritizing reliability over flashiness.
Sure, infrastructure-first AI is slower to build, but it is infinitely more valuable than an out-of-the-box “solution” that promises to eliminate human involvement from your day-to-day operations.
The Future: AI as the Broker’s Operations Layer, Not a Replacement
Think of AI as a freight broker’s aide — an AIde, if you will. Humans still make the decision, and AI executes. The human freight brokers focus on relationship management, exception handling, and strategy setting — not data entry and other mind-numbing, repetitive tasks.
AI becomes the “workflow engine” behind the scenes. This results in:
- More loads handled per rep.
- More accurate, streamlined operations.
- Better customer retention.
- Safer and more defensible decisions.
The Next 5 Years Belong to Brokerages That Balance AI with Humanity
It’s true that AI will transform freight brokerage operations, but not by replacing people. The winners in this technological evolution will be those who know where automation ends and human judgment begins. The future of freight brokerage is empowering teams with AI — not replacing them with it.
Drumkit builds the infrastructure that makes this possible today with our freight broker software. At Drumkit, we know that human oversight still drives decision value, and AI should be implemented thoughtfully to not blow up workflows but to free up freight brokers to focus on relationships and scale their business.
The Freight Coach said he learned from Drumkit’s CEO that the goal of AI implementation should be “removing the tedious stuff so you can operate faster, smarter, and with a whole lot more clarity.” (By the way, more and more people are listening to what Gupta has to say. He was recently named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Transportation & Aerospace list.)
Let’s connect your people with our people. Book an introductory call with Drumkit today.
