Connections 2026: Day 1 Recap

Connections 2026 Day 1: AI adoption, a tightening freight cycle, and new broker liability rules

Connections – an annual SMC³ educational and networking event – brings together carriers, shippers, logistics service providers, and technology companies each summer for three days of networking and industry education.

Monday kicked off with sessions led by some of the industry’s most credible minds, covering AI adoption, the freight market cycle, LTL operations, and the implications of May’s Supreme Court ruling on broker liability.

Collectively, their findings described an industry with less margin for inaction than it had a year ago.

Here’s what they had to say.

AI is available—the gap is in how people use it

Stanford adjunct professor Jeremy Utley opened the conference with research on AI productivity gaps. Teams with AI access outperform unassisted teams by 40% in quality, according to research from Boston Consulting Group and Harvard, but only a small fraction of people with access are seeing material gains. He said it is primarily behavioral. Most people enter a quick prompt, accept the first result, and stop.

Utley called this satisficing—being satisfied by what suffices—and said AI accelerates it.

“Assisted humans mostly settle for mediocre,” Utley said.

He pointed to Moderna as a working model. The company’s 7,000 employees are performing at the output level of a 35,000-person organization through systematic AI augmentation following a public commitment from CEO Stéphane Bancel to grow through AI rather than headcount. He told the room to assign the AI a defined role, provide written context, and give it permission to ask the questions it needs.

“What you’ll discover is AI models are spectacular at asking insightful questions if you give them permission to ask,” he said.

Revenova president and CEO Chris Wyndham described AI already running full workflows in TMS environments—structuring loads from inbound emails, generating instant quotes, matching freight to capacity, and eliminating manual reentry between systems. The limiting factor, he said, is whether companies are willing to share the data that makes it work.

“If we guard our data so closely,” Wyndham said, “it’s not going to work.”

A political forecast with freight implications

The midterm landscape matters to freight in ways that aren’t always obvious—election outcomes shape regulatory priorities, infrastructure spending, and trade policy. University of Virginia Center for Politics founder and director Dr. Larry Sabato mapped where things stand.

“He who lives by the crystal ball ends up eating ground glass,” Sabato said.

He expects the House to go Democratic, though Republicans hold a structural advantage of seven to 10 seats from redistricting, meaning Democrats need to flip 11 to 14 seats to take control. The Senate likely stays Republican. Presidential approval on economic handling sits at 29%, and voters, Sabato said, have long memories.

“They’re remembering the pain they felt, not the gain they’ve gotten recently,” Sabato said. “That’s not everybody, but I’m saying it’s enough to determine an election.”

He flagged the ongoing conflict in Iran as an additional variable, with over 60% of voters holding an unfavorable view of the war.

For an industry that tracks FMCSA funding, infrastructure spending, and trade policy as closely as freight rates, which party controls the House in January will matter a great deal.

The freight cycle has turned, but costs are climbing with it

ACT Research vice president and senior analyst Tim Denoyer described the current freight environment as the first supply-driven upcycle after nearly four years of contraction. Truckload spot rates are up roughly 40% to 45% year over year. Contract rates are up 10% and climbing, with Denoyer projecting a 20% increase by year-end as the lag between spot and contract closes.

“We are finally in a really good place from a freight cycle perspective,” Denoyer said.

LTL volumes have turned positive for publicly reporting carriers, and he expects high-single-digit LTL tonnage growth in the coming quarters as truckload tightening pushes volume to adjacent modes. The Class 8 fleet has grown below replacement rate for 18 months, shrinking by roughly 40,000 units, and EPA NOx regulations arriving in 2027 will add an estimated $10,000 per new truck while suppressing new orders.

ATRI president and COO Rebecca Brewster reported that insurance premiums climbed 18.6% from 2021 to 2024 as verdicts in the upper half of cases against the industry grew at 5.7% annually, despite improving crash rates. Cargo theft is running at roughly $6.6 billion per year.

“The size of verdicts against the industry is on the rise,” Brewster said, “and that’s in spite of the fact that the industry’s crash involvement is going down.”

LTL complexity is underestimated by shippers and the industry

Dave Bush, J.B. Hunt vice president of LTL, approached LTL from opposite ends of the relationship. Bush spent 18 years on the asset carrier side and 12 years at large 3PLs before joining J.B. Hunt to build out a mode the company was not historically known for.

He described a mode the industry has chronically underexplained.

“They want their product shipped timely and intact,” Bush said of shippers. “They don’t think much at all about all the underpinnings of what it takes. It requires ongoing dialogue.”

J.B. Hunt rebuilt its TMS from the ground up after its existing platform, designed for intermodal and truckload, proved unable to support LTL’s requirements. AI is now handling quote generation from emailed requests, removing the manual response step. Bush’s near-term target is pre-pickup visibility, giving customers shipment status before the freight leaves the origin.

Broker liability standards shifted, and the industry is still absorbing it

The day closed with a panel on Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, the Supreme Court’s unanimous May 14, 2026, ruling that removed federal preemption as a defense for brokers facing state-law negligent carrier selection claims. Matt Minton of C.H. Robinson, Daniel Hoff of the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA), and Jim Mullen of the Truckload Carriers Association (TCA) agreed that FMCSA data alone no longer constitutes reasonable care in carrier selection.

“In order to have reasonable care when you’re selecting carriers, you need to go above and beyond,” Minton said.

All three identified FMCSA capacity as the structural problem underneath the ruling. The agency has one employee for every 7,200 regulated trucking companies. A carrier can obtain operating authority, buy a truck, and begin hauling freight before a new entrant safety audit, sometimes 11 months later.

“The FMCSA does not have the tools to do what these folks need them to do,” Mullen said.

TCA has published a white paper on FMCSA modernization at truckload.org. And TIA has petitioned for the release of high-risk carrier lists and a minimum vetting threshold brokers could apply consistently when evaluating carriers.

Both Hoff and Mullen said the brokerage and trucking communities are aligned on one thing—entry-level standards for both brokers and carriers are overdue, and Congress is the only entity that can make that happen next.

Adjustment is overdue

Across AI, the freight cycle, LTL, and broker liability, Monday’s sessions described an industry in which conditions have moved faster than organizational responses. Contract rates are climbing toward a projected year-end peak, broker liability exposure from the May ruling is already active, and the AI productivity gap is widening for organizations that have deferred investment. The returns from acting are available now—and they are also finite.