Tomorrow Is Here: What Connections 2026 Revealed About Trust, AI, and the Future of Freight
Authored by SMC³ on July 15, 2026
By Day 3 of Connections 2026 at The Breakers in Palm Beach, one thing was clear: the LTL industry isn’t just waiting for the next freight cycle—it’s actively reshaping what comes next.
Across three days, conversations ranged from AI adoption and a fragile freight recovery to LTL’s structural growing pains and the ongoing legal fallout from broker liability rulings. The final day pulled those threads together around two questions that will define the next several years:
- When price isn’t enough, what actually earns a shipper’s trust?
- As everyone races to deploy AI, how much risk are they really bringing into the business?
The day closed with a forward-looking panel that stepped back from the details and asked what will truly matter over the next 12 months—and who will be left behind.
Shippers Buy on Price—But They Leave Over Trust
The morning opened with one of freight’s oldest tensions: what shippers say they value versus what they actually buy.
Mastio & Company president Kevin Huntsman shared two decades of shipper survey data. Year after year, when asked what percentage of their carrier choice comes down to price, the answer is remarkably consistent: roughly 80%.
ArcBest chief commercial officer Eddie Sorg argued that the remaining 20% is where the real game is played. That slice—how a carrier performs, how it communicates, how it handles problems—is what makes or breaks long-term relationships.
“Even if they are chasing price or believe that they need a lower price point, there’s a baseline expectation that you have to service them well,” Sorg said.
That baseline is harshest at the very start of the relationship. When ABF Freight analyzed why it loses business in the first 40 days, the answer pointed inward.
“It was almost 100% because we failed that first opportunity,” Sorg explained.
Two friction points surfaced again and again:
- Cargo claims – Nothing erodes trust faster, especially as custom orders and specialized freight become more common and the cost of a mistake rises.
- Billing accuracy – Shippers remember when the invoice doesn’t match the expectation, and in LTL that gap is often baked into the pricing model itself.
Sorg traced many billing surprises back to the complexity of traditional LTL pricing—negotiated rates, discounts, and reclassifications that create a persistent disconnect between what a shipper thinks they’ll pay and what they ultimately see on the bill.
ArcBest built its dynamic pricing engine partly to close that gap. By pricing shipments one by one instead of relying on static, negotiated rate structures that require constant and imperfect updates, the company is trying to replace surprise with transparency.
But the conversation didn’t stop at numbers. Both Sorg and Huntsman pointed to a less-quantified, but increasingly decisive, trust signal: the people touching the freight.
Huntsman noted that Mastio’s research frequently finds the relationship between a shipper and a driver can outweigh the relationship with an account rep. Those daily, on-the-dock interactions are where promises are either reinforced—or quietly undermined.
ArcBest has leaned into that reality by making drivers part of the sales story. Newer sales reps go on driver ride-alongs, spending a day on the route to see what the job really demands and how a trusted driver can open doors a rep alone never could.
The message was clear: price wins bids, but people and consistency keep freight.
Inside the AI Black Box: The Biggest Risks Are Human
The next session turned to the topic that has hovered over every conference in 2026: AI.
Echo Global Logistics CIO Zach Jecklin sat down with Dr. Alan Amling of the University of Tennessee’s Global Supply Chain Institute. Amling’s research centers on a blunt question: if AI is so powerful, why are so many companies still struggling to get real ROI from it?
His answer: the problem isn’t the math—it’s the humans.
“The biggest gap that we’re seeing is problem definition,” Amling said.
Too many organizations pour money into AI tools before they have done the hard, front-end work of asking:
- What problem are we actually trying to solve?
- What is the current process, and where does it break?
- How will people need to work differently once we deploy this technology?
Most companies, Amling argued, spend 90% of every AI dollar on technology and only a sliver on preparing the organization to absorb it. That ratio should be much closer to even.
The bigger barrier isn’t data science—it’s culture.
“It’s humans, it’s egos, it’s the way we’ve done it in the past” that derail AI adoption, he warned.
Amling also challenged the room to be honest about AI’s limitations. All algorithms are biased because all of them are coded—and trained—by humans.
“All algorithms are biased because humans coded it.”
AI is trained on past decisions, but it has no visibility into why those decisions were made or what alternatives were rejected. Amling recalled examples from his UPS career where leadership deliberately sacrificed short-term profit for long-term competitive position. An AI model trained purely on those outcomes would repeat them—without understanding the strategic tradeoff behind them.
On safeguards, Amling highlighted three non-negotiables:
- Don’t take your eye off cybersecurity. As AI systems touch more critical data and decisions, the attack surface grows.
- Understand the bias baked into your data. You can’t eliminate bias, but you must know where it lives and how it shows up in outcomes.
- Keep a human in the loop. Someone has to be empowered to question, override, or halt bad outputs before they propagate.
For all the caution, Amling’s outlook was anything but pessimistic.
“It’s actually very exciting and scary how fast the technology is developing,” he said.
Five years ago, he would tell audiences that the ambition for AI outpaced the technology. He no longer uses that caveat. The capability is here—and for companies that are aligned at the top, “there truly is a first-mover advantage.”
In LTL specifically, Amling expects organizational readiness to become a visible dividing line within just a few years.
“You’re going to see a marked difference between the haves and the have-nots.”
The winners won’t just be the ones with the flashiest tools—they’ll be the ones that rewired their processes and people to use them.
A Market Looking Up—and an Industry Looking Inward
The conference closed with a panel that zoomed out from individual sessions to the bigger picture: where is LTL headed next?
Moderator Elisabeth Barna of EAB Strategies was joined by The Journal of Commerce senior editor Bill Cassidy, DC Velocity senior editor Victoria Kickham, ATRI president Rebecca Brewster, and University of Tennessee supply chain student Clay Winnick.
Cassidy admitted he arrived expecting a cautious tone. Instead, he heard something different.
“It was a surprise on the upside,” he said, pointing to consistent optimism about freight volumes and the need to hire more drivers.
At the same time, the panel spotlighted challenges that aren’t moving nearly fast enough. Cassidy and Kickham both noted that the share of female over-the-road drivers has been stuck near 5% for more than a decade—despite sustained recruiting efforts and industry initiatives.
The conversation eventually swung back to AI, which had been unavoidable throughout the week.
For Brewster, the event was something of an inflection point.
She described Connections 2026 as “a sea change event” for her own thinking on AI at ATRI.
Rather than viewing AI primarily as a threat to jobs, she pointed to discussions about finding people who can work effectively with the technology.
Cassidy drew a sharp line between hype and reality. Much of what the industry currently labels as “AI,” he argued, is really advanced automation focused on eliminating inefficiencies.
The more transformational frontier is using AI as a true assistant—to optimize a customer’s network, simulate scenarios, and solve complex problems end-to-end. That capability isn’t science fiction; it exists today. The bottleneck is no longer technology.
“Now it’s a matter of adoption,” Cassidy said.
Looking ahead to the next 12 months, the panel saw capacity pressure building from several directions at once:
- Stricter enforcement around English-language proficiency and non-domiciled CDL holders.
- Rising costs squeezing small carriers.
- The fallout from the Montgomery decision on broker liability, pushing carriers and brokers toward more stringent vetting.
Individually, each of these trends adds friction. Together, they could sharply redraw who can compete—and under what conditions.
When asked to capture Connections 2026 in one headline, Brewster didn’t hesitate: “Tomorrow is here.”
Leaving The Breakers, it was hard to disagree.
See You in Atlanta
Connections 2026 wrapped as it began: with an industry in motion.
Over three days, attendees wrestled with a freight market trying to find its footing, an industry deciding how far to trust its data, and a reminder that—even amid AI and automation—every load still moves on relationships.
The conversations don’t stop in Palm Beach. The next major milestone is already on the calendar.
SMC³’s Jump Start 2027—the definitive supply chain intelligence gathering—runs January 25–27 in Atlanta. Carriers, shippers, logistics service providers, and technology partners will reconvene to set the tone for the year ahead.
Mark your calendar. By the time we get to Atlanta, the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” that Amling described may already be widening.
Tomorrow is here. The question now is: who’s ready to run with it?