Logistics Leaders Confront A Crowded AI Market As Flawed Buying Journeys Limit Progress

AI adoption keeps stalling in freight and logistics, and it has nothing to do with the tech. Leaders looking to invest face a market flooded with hype, overlapping tools, and vague sales pitches that can make it difficult to evaluate solutions on their actual operational value. Step one is to fix the buying journey so the solutions that truly move the needle can finally rise above the noise.

Will Hopkins, Co-Founder and Managing Member at Black Box Logistics and Co-Host of the 2 Dawgs, 1 Pod logistics podcast, has been trying to cut through that noise himself. His experience scouting tools from the ground floor shows how a broken buying journey can stall adoption long before the tech ever reaches a pilot.

"When I log in to LinkedIn, it’s all AI, AI, AI. There's so much noise that finding the signal takes real work. I'm not interested in being anyone's test case, because the risk still outweighs the reward. Until the market shows clearer value, I'm focused on evaluating what's real rather than jumping into experiments for the sake of it," says Hopkins.

• Testing for truth: His search for a practical solution reveals a sharp divide in the market. Some vendors gloss over pilot failures, offer narrow tools that create more clutter than value, and rely on business models that reward activity instead of results. Others take a genuinely educational approach, giving buyers a clearer view of what might actually work. "In any demo, I always ask vendors to tell me about the issues and problems with their pilots. If they won't tell me, I don't want to work with them, because I know there are always issues. A refusal to be candid makes me nervous."

• Vendor overload: Managing AI in freight can quickly turn into a tangle of point solutions that create more work than they solve, Hopkins explains. "I don’t want to have one company for my AI call screener and another that does carrier sales really well. The next thing I know, I’m managing eight different vendors." Fragmentation kills efficiency, he says, and any tool that adds operational overhead defeats the purpose.

But Hopkins' most powerful insight is that for a large portion of the industry, this entire conversation misses the point. He divides freight into two pools: large, tech-savvy enterprise players who are seeing AI-driven gains and the much larger segment of SMBs. For the latter group, he believes the "adopt or die" narrative is a fiction.

• No juice, no squeeze: Hopkins says most SMB shippers live in a space where tech bells and whistles matter far less than reliable service and reachable partners. The lesson isn't to ignore new tools, but to stay critical. "There’s a lot of fear posting about going out of business if you don’t adopt every new thing," he says. “For many operators, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze unless there's provable value in implementing a tool."

Despite that, Hopkins isn't skeptical of AI. He's actively looking to scope tools for text-based triage, email parsing, and automated load detail population as prime targets for AI to enhance his workflow. His goal is to make his team more efficient, grounding any investment in a core metric: the cost-to-operate-per-load.

• The sound of silence: Hopkins says some of the most reliable value right now comes from text-based tools that streamline communication without creating friction. "I like text based-AI because it pulls the data fast and gets straight to the point. A short pause in a message feels normal, almost like a quick reply. On the phone, those same processing gaps become awkward, which is why voice agents still don’t land for me."

• Call a spade a spade: But that pursuit of efficiency comes with a human cost. Hopkins dismisses the sanitized narrative that AI will only create new jobs. For a pragmatic operator, he says, the math points to a different reality. "AI shifts the ratios. I could replace eight track and trace reps with automated agents and keep one experienced person as the escalation point. The work doesn’t disappear, but the manpower does," Hopkins explains. "New roles may emerge, yet the simple truth is that greater efficiency means fewer people are needed."

Nothing captures the market's instability better than Hopkins' story of an encounter with a well-funded founder who had capital to build an AI tool for logistics but possessed zero domain knowledge, asking Hopkins what problem he should solve. Experiences like that reinforced his view that buyers need clearer signals before committing to a platform, he says. "I’ll let all these other companies do the pilots. Then I’ll let a few companies go out of business, and other companies drop their rates. And then that's when we'll jump in," Hopkins concludes. His stance isn't about staying on the sidelines, but about moving when the value is proven and the contenders have earned their place.