Are Bots Booking Freight Yet? Manifest Trend Check with Grace Sharkey

Blythe and Grace Sharkey (Orderful; formerly FreightWaves) break down what everyone’s been talking about coming out of Manifest: agentic AI moving into real workflows, drones/computer vision becoming more practical, freight fraud getting more coordinated, and why “end-to-end visibility” still isn’t end-to-end (spoiler: carrier adoption and execution still run the show).

The gist (what we cover):

• Agentic AI: not just demos—people are pushing it into rate negotiation and booking workflows
• The uncomfortable question: what happens to brokerage models when humans aren’t the bottleneck?
• Drones + computer vision: still early, but moving from “cool tech” to real use cases
• Freight fraud: it’s coordinated—and most companies still fail at the basics
• Visibility: we keep selling the dream, but execution (and carrier adoption) keeps punching it in the face
• Quick time-capsule: what 2016 taught us, what 2026 is repeating, and why insurance keeps winning

Timestamps / chapters (approx):

• 00:00 – Intro + Grace joins
• 04:35 – Agentic AI: what’s real vs what’s marketing
• 10:10 – What this changes for brokers and carriers
• 15:25 – Drones + computer vision
• 17:30 – Fraud: why basic controls still matter
• 25:40 – Visibility + ocean integrity
• 31:40 – 2016 vs 2026: the industry memory test
• 39:50 – Wrap-up + Manifest Europe note

Watch this episode on YouTube

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Transcript

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 0:37

Blythe, welcome into another episode of everything. Is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. We are proudly presented by SPI logistics, and I'm your host, Blythe Milligan, and we are here with a special episode of freight. Friends. You know the drill. You know who she is. Everybody else seems to know who she is. At manifest that is grace is Sharkey of order full fame, formerly freight waves, which we've seen a lot of freight waves alumni here, which has been super fun to connect with everybody. So, yeah, welcome. How do you How are you liking Is this your first? No, it's not your first, because you've actually been traveling a ton, doing conferences.

Grace Sharkey: 1:13

But this is, like, the first time I've gone to manifest. And like, Okay, before I go to manifest, I'm a reporter, so I would say, kind of, it's kind of chill, you know, like, you get the interviews in, you go, you walk around, you enjoy the show, a way a tourist would enjoy a city, you know. But now it's like, Oh, I've got to, like, bring leads in, you know, like, like, it's a very it's a different situation when you're, like, representing a brand, and like, figuring out, okay, how do I make this not about me, and make this about them? And so I maybe even leveraging both of those though, like, that's the cool thing. Like, I think coming to this show as my teams has been very like, you know, help us meet people and, like, kind of leverage the network that I've been able to grow for so long. And but there's also, like, that nervousness of, like, what if no one says hi to me while I'm here? And it's like, I lied about this network the whole time, so Well,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 2:17

you don't have to worry about that. You literally cannot walk down the hallway without being stopped every five feet.

Grace Sharkey: 2:22

I've been avoiding that hallway all morning because of it and and it's just, you know, it's been great. Our booth is in a perfect spot. I'm just, like, a perfectionist. I'm starting to realize, like, making sure, like, everything's set up perfectly. No cords are sticking out in weird places, like, shout out to my Hey, shout out to Mother issues. You know, that's why I was telling someone earlier. It's like, I think it's just, you know, I'm the perfectionist comes in at this point, but it's a big show. I mean, Pam told us, like, 8000 people here this year, and so how do you, from a marketing standpoint, make sure you're talking to the right people, the right people are coming to your booth. And I think, yeah, over, like, the last year just traveling, it's like, really cool to see, like, how people respond to your booth, what they're looking at. And if I had to compare, like, our booth from the first show I did, which I want to say was like our NetSuite, sweet world compared to this one. It's like, we have to say EDI bigger and more, and logos everywhere. So it's like, it's almost like a B testing in, like, real time.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 3:32

Work with a firm to help design the booth. Or do you? Are you doing it yourself?

Grace Sharkey: 3:36

Me, baby, no. So we have, like, a kind of a team. We have a couple of graphic designers that We contract out to, but no, actually, it's like me and Natalia designed this like we had, you know, we have some stuff that we built for our website and the same graphics to, like, use in different places, but yeah, no, it's, you know, it's the messaging that we worked on. And for me, I think just like logos is big at this event in particular, like showcasing the network of other companies you work with. And then when you're in such a niche technology, so like, you know, for instance, EDI, you don't want people coming to you to talk about, like, you know, other things that aren't like what you do. So I've been very like. We need to see say EDI 40 times and the biggest font ever on the screen, so that people know exactly what our discussions are. So yeah, I It's been interesting just kind of seeing the development of that, and we have some new rebranding from some of our products that you're going to see over the next like six months, that will probably start putting on our boost as well.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 4:43

So I want to get into a little bit of a because we usually will do a manifest recap. But since we're recording this on the first day the expo floor opens, I haven't actually outside of the puppy lounge, I have not seen any of the expo floor, yet, be on lookout for that interview with transfix team, and it's adorable. It's thank you to the puppy Park and Claris for hooking us up with that interview with very talented puppies, you know, crawling all over us. It was fantastic.

Grace Sharkey: 5:13

Puppies are talented here. I'll tell you that they're paid

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 5:16

actors also, because they just sat on my lap perfectly the entire time, did not make a fuss. And, yeah, it's 10 out of 10 experience. Every time I whip my hand around my face, I get a whiff of puppies again. And so I just get a little distracted. Okay, yes, I got a little off course, because what we're going to be talking about in this show is we, I. I ran through. So I took all of the agenda topics, because there's the expo floor at manifest, but then there's also all of these fantastic talks going on that I never seem to catch. So I watched the recap videos. I'm one of those weirdos that will watch the recap videos afterwards in order to see a summary of the talks that I missed. So I just went through the list of what the agenda looks like, and we got a few. We have four of trends that we're seeing as far as the agenda topics are concerned, so I thought we could just do a little breakdown of each of those. And the first one on that list is, I mean, seriously, drink every time you hear this phrase, and you'll be passed out within two hours. But AI is that probably the biggest phrase you're going to see in here throughout this entire conference, but it's going to take up a level to the agentic AI. And so, do you roll your eyes when you hear AI, or do you roll your eyes when you hear agentic AI?

Grace Sharkey: 6:34

You know, if you were to ask me this question, literally, like a couple years ago, or even last year, I would have probably rolled my eyes. I mean, you and I have been in discussions already this week with, like, people very much leading in this space. I think that maybe if you're not using these tools, and you might not know this, but there are big companies out there who are just AI agent dueling their freight already in very large companies that you've heard of. It's working. It's happening. It's, it's. And what I think is interesting about is, like, the exceptions, right? Like, we've talked to a couple people, they say, Listen, if we if the tone of voice changes, or a certain type of exception is happening, like it will get to a human but when we're talking about like negotiating rates, which, at the end of the day, is a math problem, those agents are taking care of it, and it's like it's the bots talking to each other and

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 7:34

negotiating contracts with each other. And you would think I would never want a bot to do that, but the person that we were talking to, we won't reveal the name, just in case it was a confidential conversation explaining to us the use case of as long as you have certain stipulations within your load, that you have a certain break point that you got to get to, and it reaches that break point, your agent is going to negotiate. They're going to try to negotiate higher than that, but as long as they can get that break point price for you, then it will settle for you. And even if you're negotiating with another agent that is doing it from the carrier side of things. So you can have a broker agent that's negotiating one side, and then a carrier agent that's doing the same thing. And they could both be bots, and as long as they hit their minimums for each of them, then the load will be accepted. And I think what did he, he or she say it was a little over 70% of their freight is all being booked, auto. Auto booked by bots. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's the future, and it's already here.

Grace Sharkey: 8:43

And, you know, I got into a deep conversation about this last night too, at a party of just like, how does that, how does that change the business model of a no, we're talking about pretty large companies in this situation. But that technology will drip down right as it always does. How does that change the business model of how you're setting up like a freight brokerage or a logistics provider? I mean, are we looking at a future where you can't just cover truckload because that's so simple to do is an average brokerage now have the ability to sell every single type of mode, right? Because now their agents aren't just like these, like, I hate to say it like 24 year old reps who slaying freight all day from out of college, yeah, but now we're asked to be experts in transportation and know that that market is better on rail right now, or this is, you know, and having those deeper discussions, so that when they are working these RFQs with their customers, it's, it's almost more of like a wholesome view of their supply chain, right? Like, I wonder sometimes, like, I do I get nervous for, like, medium sized brokerages that are, you know, I you guys have heard me use this word before, but like, heavy human capital, aka employees, and that's not going to be necessary. And almost like, What's scarier, I think, is that, can a company start a logistics company today and just start beating you right off the back, margin wise? Because they don't have to have those employees. I mean, because if you have all those employees, right, like theoretically, you're either going to have to change the workload by the innovation, by, you know, having them use the technology appropriately. So in that. Case, you're not really growing headcount, you're growing their expertise as they grow their books, right? And that's where the margin will change there. But it just, I think about, like, if I started a brokerage today, it's like, oh boy, it would be, it wouldn't be a cradle to grave. I'll tell you

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 10:55

that you wouldn't be hiring those fresh faced, you know, kids out of college and sitting them down at a desk to make a, you know, 100 cold calls a day,

Grace Sharkey: 11:03

and I would better not hear a carrier rep picking up the phone asking if that person can, you know, take that load. It's like you should know. With all of the tools these days, you should know that that capacity is available and that they can take the load, right? It's that like tendering. It's that instant send over. And I think there's always been this like, it's kind of like the mischief of, like, is there a driver shortage? I think what this is going to show in kind of to like the people we've been talking to this week. I don't think drivers hate it anymore. I don't think I, I bet you drivers, unless there's a real problem, which I think a lot of this tech is even smart enough to know to expedite that to someone the younger generation drivers aren't want to, like, pick up the phone and talk to four brokers about what load they're taking. That's crazy. No, they want to go on an app, like we do everything else in our lives, and find a load that way. So what about

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 12:55

from the lens up? Because my before we had these conversations this week, my thought process was, carriers are out on the road alone for most of most of the time, unless they're a teen driver, they have, you know, pets in the cab. But wouldn't they want to talk to people? And that's where i i almost empathize with the truckers, is that now they have no one to talk to, and they have no one to connect with, except for a bot,

Grace Sharkey: 13:20

sure, but I'm like, I might call Rita truck marketing club. He would love to talk to you, but maybe that's you, know. Now you can call home more true? Yeah? Maybe you can talk to your kid on the road. Well, maybe less BS.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 13:35

You don't have to have, you don't have to have all of those Bs conversations. Where are you at? Where are you at? Every five minutes, you have the technology to show the broker where you're at, so they don't have to bug you and you have those meaningless conversations, yeah? So maybe it does open the door for more meaningful conversation.

Grace Sharkey: 13:51

And I think that's the key, right? Is like, now when I'm calling, it's like, I'm not calling you to pick up a load. I'm calling you to let you know I love this load, and I'm trying to figure out how I can earn the opportunity to just get this tendered to me every Monday. I know, yeah, true. But like, in terms of, like, the whole like, oh, they picked up the phone and, you know, heard a robot voice and hated it. I, I don't think that's happening. I think the only time, or it's, I think it's dying away,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 14:20

yeah, I it. People are going to slowly as they become more used to this. You know, we kind of had the debate the other day on the new commercial from Flexport, yes, and I liked it. And you were like, they need to make some improvement.

Grace Sharkey: 14:36

The only one, honestly, that, like, did not like it. Like, more and more people like, I thought Reed would be like, yeah, it's not good. I mean, read did the AI slot panel, and he was like, I like it. And I'm like, Fine. Do I Do I like it? I so my you guys know me. I'm stubborn. Dude, stuck in this way.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 14:56

Well, the thing I love about Flexport and Ryan Peterson, I know a lot of people have a lot of gripes about him, but he does a great job of explaining shipping and logistics to the masses, to the people who don't speak the lingo. And so him having that, you know, commercial even, I didn't even notice that the mouth didn't match up with the audio. And on a rewatch, I did notice

Grace Sharkey: 15:19

editors thrown in there. Now, yeah, okay, but here, actually, now let me, like, push this back to you, to your point of like, to the masses. Help everyone understand what is the masses, their customer profile,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 15:33

maybe, if they're freight forwarder and they want to partner with E commerce companies, because didn't they just partner with a lot of Shopify or official three PL for Shopify?

Grace Sharkey: 15:41

So yeah, and if you need EDI for Shopify, add to order pool.com. Because we have a really easy connector for it.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 15:49

She's spending some money at these conferences, spending some money on some podcast too? Exactly.

Grace Sharkey: 15:55

No, you're right. Well, I keep forgetting about the Shopify aspect of it, too. No. I mean, dang it. I I was like, I get her with that customer profile, and

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 16:06

it just comes down to the Democrat, democratization of these different tools and technology that now you have a Shopify that can give you an E commerce platform. You have Flexport that can give you a three PL capability. You have, we just did an interview with gather AI yesterday, and their drone software, really their software that can plug into forklifts as well, and how it can do inventory scans and how, you know, maybe. We won't have a day where there's an all lights out warehouse, but you could have a warehouse if you're in obviously, if your yard is big enough, but you could have a little one person warehouse in your backyard that hooks directly up to your Shopify store, and you have someone that handles the shipping. It's probably going to be you, but you can do all of these things, and these tools are becoming less about, you know, spending 500 grand to onboard a new TMS or a new WMS, but now you have access to all of these things.

Grace Sharkey: 16:59

So, like, even to that point too, you could, I can't remember the name of their company, but they are a venture 53 company. And then to that point you could also sublease, like a drone situation, and deliver on drones too.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 17:13

I We talked about this on our drone episode, and I we talked about the kiosk that China has where you can place a food delivery order, go to the kiosk and the drone drops it off on a landing pad on top of the kiosk. I think we are five years tops away of homes having their own landing pads for drone deliveries. I think it's just going to be $100 kit that you get from Amazon, and they'll be sending drones or zip line, and they'll be dropping stuff off right at your house within two hours.

Grace Sharkey: 17:44

I do love that too, because, you know, I love to save on rent. So I live in a I live in a neighborhood. You know that? You know it's, it's gentrifying, we could say that. And it'd be nice to, like, set that up in my backyard and just know my packages are being delivered on my back porch when I'm gone, and not like my front porch. Oh no, she's right. I guess I you know her the usual like the Flexport commercial. Can someone also, you know what I will say, too, like Ryan Peterson, like has balls, like I was telling him he's willing to shake some shit up. I'll send you the screenshot. But someone, someone replied to him on Twitter and said, This is AI slap. And he just said, You're AI slap. And I was like, Heck yes, that is so good.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 18:38

Well, I think that that I

Grace Sharkey: 18:39

may frame that within my house. No, your answer,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 18:43

like that tweet and just frame it, yeah, well, and

Grace Sharkey: 18:45

it's but that's how I mean, we see it in so many different aspects of our lives, whether it's like elections and stuff like that. Like, that's how younger generations are going to communicate, you know? It's like, no, your AI slob, you know?

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 18:59

And I think that covers the time we kind of hit on the second one that I was going to mention, as far as, like, takeaways from the agenda topics, because it's drone and computer vision. So that was my theory around the the one person warehouse, and especially from like, a 3d printing aspect too, which could revolutionize manufacturing, where a lot of the things maybe you don't need to go to the store anymore, and you're just going to print it the replacement part at your house, and you have your own little mini shipping department. So that was the second one, drones and computer vision. The next one is, I mean, this one continues to be endlessly fascinating, and it's the industrialized fraud versus the Situation Room. I interviewed the CEO of overhaul yesterday, Barry Conlan, is he? I think that was my favorite conversation of all time.

Grace Sharkey: 19:47

Did he get into, like, his military background and like that aspect Special Forces. Isn't that so believable?

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 19:54

I'll put the link in the show notes, in case anybody wants to listen to it, because I could have, I'm so sad that I only had 25 minutes with him, because I could have talked to him for hours. Yeah, and a little note, he accidentally left his badge here, and I watched over it for overhaul, so I secured his badge for him so, and he didn't. He came back looking for it, and he said, he's like, I knew you would look out. Yeah, and I did. So shout out to Barry.

Grace Sharkey: 20:19

I know I love people. He reminds me of, like Ryan over at Gen logs, like people who come from, like, an interesting background. Like, I wouldn't say he wasn't in supply chain in his old roles, but, like, weird

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 20:32

military logistics. Military logistics had a company for a while that he sold that company, and he's been, he started overhaul about 10 years ago.

Grace Sharkey: 20:41

It's, it's fascinating. He's, yeah, really, I'm gonna check out that conversation. He's a cool guy.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 20:46

You should, hopefully you're listening to every episode I am, but the industrial the he was talking about how just advanced that all of these different criminal syndicates are in the United States, and how they're they could be two steps ahead, and it's up to the shippers that are becoming more aware to become to put that pressure on the brokers and The carriers that they work with to make sure that they're doing simple things. And he talked about how if one of his shipments that they're overlooking that if it's seized and or recovered, then they still consider that a failure, because that shipment wasn't protected so and he also another interesting moment for. That conversation is he said that because the tech is so advanced that these people know how to break into the tech, but it's often simple things, like somebody using a Costco card instead of a Real ID to check in for the load, or changing names at the on on the bol versus the driver that's picking it up. Then he's mentioned too, that a lot of what's working here at crime wise is now being shipped over to the UK, so they're seeing a lot of the different crime that has already worked here. They're using that same, those same tactics all over the world now.

Grace Sharkey: 22:05

Yeah, there was, um, I don't have we ever talked on this show, and I I never, I think I know who it was, but I never was able to confirm, like, near the tail end of Freightways, but there was, like, a giant shipper who, at the time, was like, I don't want to say suing, but asking for money back to a lot of large logistics companies because of a bol scandal. So, like, basically what happened is they had the bad guys, you could say, had somehow gotten insider, inside, like this large retailer. And when things were delivered, they would just change the paperwork so it looked like it wasn't short, but it was actually every load was short. They were skimming. And we all know shippers, they're gonna push that back, right? So once they found it, they came back to, like all these logistics companies, like, you owe us $8 million in lost cargo. And you know, I just think it's interesting, because you get well right now, right with ch Robinson and the Supreme Court, like, when you start crossing borders, and there's so many parties involved, like, who does legally, like, who's responsible for this? And and so it's like, it'll be interesting to, like, have this technology, like, truly gives you, like, a paper trail so that you can showcase, like, listen, we did our job correctly here. This is what you hired us for. This is what we did. And shippers, you're gonna have to get on top of people. I when I was in brokerage, I won't say the company, but it was a company that, well, they use potatoes lots, and their potatoes have a like, their DNA, or whatever is like, what do you call it? Is IP, oh so in and this was, I didn't even know that this was a farm for this large company that uses a lot of potatoes, like you can probably figure it out. And I remember one day this lady called us, and she's like, Hey, did your driver come pick up this load? And we, we told them, Well, we actually never found someone to pick it up, so we haven't even sent anyone in for it. She's like, Well, someone came and picked up this load, and so it's like, stolen now. And she was like, trying to put it on us. And we're like, we didn't. And I remember telling her, like, do you have camera? Like, first off, you have to prove something was stolen. And you can't just be like, I had an issue with even the same thing with, like a prison load. They were saying, like, a palette didn't deliver correctly. And it ended up being like, this whole ordeal, because in order to prove it, like, we'd have to get the FBI involved. Was like, but for that potato shipper, she's like, well, it's, you know, a special potato, if it gets out there and, like, someone gets this DNA, like it's, it's our competitive advantage. This was like a farm who would just let anyone roll up to it? No, literally, like the check in process was like, Hey, Jim Bob, I'm here. Like, they had no cameras. They had no sign in so they can't even, like, prove who even physically went in there and picked up the load and so, like, that's where I'm, like, interested in the shipper side is like, where are we going to start to see, like, more them themselves. Like, take response. I don't want to say responsibility, but put maybe these like thresholds to make sure they're even safeguarding themselves. Because I remember just being like, Oh my God. Like, Well, anyone could steal this person's potato recipe. Like, you know, I mean, if that's how, that's how situations run, what

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 25:42

we kind of saw after, you know, sort of a BC and AC, now before covid And after covid, but after, this was before, yeah, so after covid, what you're seeing is, you know, the supply chain executives are getting a seat at the boardroom table. And now what the what Barry was saying is that it's not just supply chain, but the fraud specialist team from supply chain is also a seat at the table now, and some of the smart shippers are employing that process and then pushing it out to all of the people that they work with. And it's there. It's all of these preventative measures. And then ultimately, you know, they you know, want to prevent the load from ever being stolen, but then, if it does get stolen, having that situation room working with law enforcement teams all over the globe in order to retrieve it, and helping law enforcement understand how to use. This different technology, because a lot of it, they just consider petty theft and that there's nothing that they can do. But now, with overhaul providing those kind of resources to law enforcement, they can be a little bit more preventative, but then also preemptive, where if a load does get stolen, I think within like the first like 100 miles or something, is where the overwhelming majority of the loads get stolen after they get picked up. And so being able to have some kind of, you know, tracking technology within that radius helps recover loads as well. All right, last one on this list is ocean integrity and predictive trade visibility is always, I think, just for like, the last 10 years has been such a hot topic, and it feels like Have we already reached peak visibility? But from my conversations, we have not. We barely scratched the surface. As far as visibility is concerned,

Grace Sharkey: 27:21

I would almost maybe, like the best way. I think we're nowhere close to, like you seeing that visibility for like, a good purpose too. It's like, okay, I think one, there's a lot of data issues still with visibility, where it's like, is this really showcasing the capacity in its correct form, right? Like, do I still, I was just talking with flock freight, like, is there still, you know, four pallets of space that we can use, you know, that's I think I wonder if, like, if we're actually at a point where we're we we have the visibility tools in place, maybe the data is finally flowing well, are we executing that, that information correctly, right? Like, are we using the capacity in an area to the best of its capabilities and to, maybe, like, when I talk visibility data, I think to the point that we started off with with AI agents, like, that's a that's a execution of visibility data, right, to be able to negotiate the rates and know, okay,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 28:26

so it's from the ocean side of things. It's from the warehouse side of things. So inventory counts, where is my stuff? When is my stuff going to get to me? But the biggest gap still remains is with carriers adopting visibility solutions. 90% of care, or 90% of all carriers, have seven trucks or fewer, and so this adoption of technology has been really challenging for them, and they're kind of the end piece to the visibilities, or to end to end visibility. So it really just depends on, are the carriers going to adopt this technology and maybe seize the day and protect their future by adopting, you know, greater visibility, additional AI agents, and really challenging themselves to rethink their processes and adopt because change is so hard, especially when it comes to tech, especially at the rapid evolution of tech over the last handful of years, it's very difficult, I think, for a lot of people, to keep up, but I still think it's important to mention that we are still so early to all of this, and if you're building AI agents today, just know you are in such a small minority, but this is literally the future of new information era that we find ourselves in.

Grace Sharkey: 29:38

Well, it's like it's always that adoption curve too. And with that adoption curve comes the the the cost of that technology will come down too. And so I, I wonder where we are at that curve, you know, is it becoming easier for them to invest in, I will say. And I think I brought this up to you like this week, interesting about being more on the SaaS side of things. And I think, you know, orderful, we have a lot of retail clients, right? But we also do have a lot of great transportation and logistics providers, those business models, those margins, are completely different. And so when you're talking to a retailer, I think it's easy to like, show like the ROI of like some of these technologies, when you're talking to a carrier who's like, knows in the back of their mind that they're in the middle of a bankruptcy stuff, and they can't figure out how to run their their business under a like 100 operating ratio, like, more money, like time. Yeah, you have to make that story not about money and time. You know? You have to make that about the future. You almost have to, like, make it a partnership, like one of my favorite companies, who I think does this for carriers in particular, is optimal dynamics. They worked with. What's a BCB? Oh, then, then

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 31:09

they sold. Oh, yeah, BCB got sold,

Grace Sharkey: 31:11

yes, but I forget everybody down there, yes, he, he worked with them, really, and they did a really fun case study when I was at Freightways, where, when they came into the his company, they had, I think it was on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the technology was the only thing allowed to book loads and on. Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays, the dispatchers are able to do the way they do things. And, you know, they thought they're like, fair competition. Who doesn't like a competition, you know? And if I remember, right, it was, like, a couple weeks into it, they started to realize, like, oh, when this thing's booking for us on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we actually make more money as dispatchers. And so, like, it basically they set it up to, like, basically prove to them in real time, like, what they're missing. And then slowly they're able to to expand into the full operation. Because they basically were, like, here, like, you know, make me eat my words. Then if this is wrong, and

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 32:10

Rick Larkin over it, yeah. Well, I know they sold to a different company, but I BCB was one of my first website clients for digital dispatch, yeah, and so we did a lot, and I remember visiting their facility. He even back then, you know, he was very much like pro technology had TVs everywhere, tracking the weather and trucks and but also very driver focused. They had one of the best safety scores, and so he was very much about the culture and providing a tech positive culture for his drivers, you know, such a just a good use case or case study, maybe for the rest of the carriers to kind of follow that you can do both and still maintain a profitable company enough to sell it off. I know we only have a I don't see we're in a podcast booth right now, and we're on a scheduled time until one o'clock. We just hit 1pm but I don't see anybody else around us. Yeah, we've been planning to, like, take it over, so

Grace Sharkey: 33:08

I do have a chat at 130 like, another 10 minutes or so,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 33:11

perfect, because you had a great idea about taking part in this trend of 2016 versus 2026 you've probably seen it around on social media while we were talking. I just asked chat GPT to tell me some of the big stories that were happening in 2016 compared to 2026 so I think this is a good jump down memory lane that in 2016 what trended in supply chain were e commerce in the last mile panic. Retailers were still trying to find the RAS or the right last mile partner. As e com climbed and consumer expectations sped up,

Grace Sharkey: 33:44

Walmart, I think, in that year, bought jet.com and that was like their big we're gonna fight against Amazon.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 33:50

Play. About jet.com Wow. Yeah, interesting. Okay, so second one, which is maybe kind of related to that omni channel as a buzzword, not a bloodstream, so buy online, pickup in store was cutting edge systems were fragmented and stitched together with duct tape. So that was the second one. So maybe the omni channel approach target

Grace Sharkey: 34:15

Walmart, there's one that we touched on earlier. 2016 was the year that zipline was the first drone company to get the FFA clearance to start moving meds in Africa. Oh, interesting. I was like, the first and then, because remember, like, all the drones couldn't get, like, clearance, and they're like, Oh, well, if we, if we don't do it in the United States, then we can make it work. So they were, like, the first ones that took off, yeah. And they were delivering

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 34:44

blood to Rwanda, yep. And now it's been so successful, because I think they just released this recently, that it's been so successful with delivering blood that they actually have had to cut back on those deliveries, because it's been so successful and so business line that they were proud to cut back on, which I thought was such a really cool, like marketing story, that, you know, some nefarious, more nefarious companies probably wouldn't do that, but zipline did really cool, really cool company. Third one on this list is digitization was happening, but mostly as point solutions, so forwarding and logistics. Digitization existed, but it was early and uneven, so you had a lot of portals, not a lot of orchestration. So that one is kind of,

Grace Sharkey: 35:28

here's one that I thought was fun from 2016 and this is, like, very niche, so you might not remember this. But do you remember the to talk about, like, global capacity? Do you remember the company, Hanjin? I'm probably saying that wrong, Cajun or agent? Yeah, the video a no, no, no. The like, the the Chinese shipper that went bankrupt and then just started. Oh, well, like, drop just told the the ships to just stay there.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 35:57

Well, it's kind of like when a trucking company goes out of business, they

Grace Sharkey: 36:01

were like, all they were like, they just dropped like, so there was, like, all these ships outside of Vancouver, I think, LA, that were just like,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 36:07

dropping anchor and leaving. They just left. Yeah, what happened to the merchant mariners, you know, I know,

Grace Sharkey: 36:12

I want to say they like towed those puppies somewhere. They, wow, took all the freight, and they just, like towed them away. So there was, like, a big capacity. Oh, this is the big one that I had emailed you about that was a bit, I thought, a big deal. 2016 was the year that the Panama Canal finished. If. Expansion. So shout out to Houston, because the Port of Houston, right was the biggest, probably, obviously Houston, maybe even, like Savannah, a little bit Louisiana. Yeah, Louisiana, because it was now became competitive against how quickly you could get.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 36:48

So Miami, New Orleans, Houston, anywhere in the gold

Grace Sharkey: 36:52

shout out to sonar. I mean, one of my favorite sonar charts, I just because I think it's like, just such a cool way of looking at it was the like, has a different name, but I was used to always call it the Panama Canal index. And it would shift throughout the year, and it would tell you, like, if it's cheaper to go to LA or to spend the extra day or so and go to Houston? And so I like, look back, and it's like, wow, if that didn't happen, it probably would have never been Houston, right? And now, like, I think, like, do the Chinese still even own a Panama Canal? Didn't they flip that last week?

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 37:25

Well, what they were, what they were trying to do is they were establishing different offices or control points around the Panama Canal, and since the US built the damn thing, so they were like, they shut that shit down. Because there's been a lot of a couple weeks ago, right? It was this year. I know that it started. The administration had started talking about it, that this is something that we needed to look at. And then they shut that shit down. And China kind of gave up very quickly in regards to that. And Panama said, All right, yeah, we're gonna caught us red handed. Whoops. Can in a cookie jar. But that's the amazing thing about global trade, is that all of these different choke points all around the world and how militaries, throughout the course of human civilization, will protect those trade lanes and those different contest points, with an army,

Grace Sharkey: 38:14

with ships. We even know the Suez Canal could, like, break down, right, which is such a funny thing to look back at, you know, like, remember that? Remember it happened? I remember this story 2020, I remember Kim writing that story at freight waves. And it like go because I always work late because I'm an idiot, and it going through like, the thing. And I was like, Kim, because I think it just hit Twitter. We're so it definitely wasn't like, CNN or anything. And I'm like, and I was like, Kim, what are you writing about? And she's like, Yo, this ship is, like, trapped. And it was like, six o'clock at night, because I remember being like, ready on the radio. And yeah, dude, well, that was the Suez Canal. But then think about it, we have, then we had, of course, all the other issues that we had, a route around the Middle East for wars.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 39:00

And, you know, obviously the conflict that goes on there

Grace Sharkey: 39:04

is this, are we just always in like a black swan event?

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 39:08

We just know about it more because of social media, I've been following a lot of like anthropology podcasts and trying to I love anthropology. I probably should have been an anthropologist, but just understanding the reasons why humans do certain things and what we care about nowadays versus what we maybe cared about 20 years ago. As you know, we're talking about 2016 versus 2026 and it is we only have the capacity to care about so many things, but now we're bombarded with the you used to only care about what happened in your village and your tribe, but now we're bombarded with all of the world's tribes and conflicts, and it's overwhelming, and I think it's driving people a little freaking nuts. Yeah, you can clearly see it playing out on social media, whether or not those are

Grace Sharkey: 39:54

by phone on, do not disturb. People make fun of me for it. It's like, kind of a thing at orderful, they make fun of me for it. They're like, you're always on, do not disturb. It's because I don't need to be disturbed. That's what slack right for exactly?

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 40:08

Yeah, I will answer you during certain time frames, because even from like a mental capacity, you're only, you only have bandwidth, from like an evolution standpoint, to care for about 150 people. Anything more than that is overloaded for our brains.

Grace Sharkey: 40:25

You're my top 150 of course, I

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 40:28

better get like your top 20. Heck

Grace Sharkey: 40:30

yes, yeah, oh yeah, you're my top 20 dude. All right,

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 40:34

last one here because we still haven't been interrupted yet and we got to go eat lunch because I haven't eaten a full meal in days. The last one on here for 2026 or 2016 trends is risk equals supplier scorecards and insurance, not a real time function. Visibility was often shipment tracking, not end to end, risk sensing, which we still kind of don't have that, but maybe on the ocean side of things, but definitely not on the carrier side of things. If I

Grace Sharkey: 41:00

could go back and, like, invest in insurance in 2016 I'd be so rich. You know what? Yeah, for sure. Hathaway figured it out, the

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 41:12

picks and the shovels, that's what you got to invest in. Yes,

Grace Sharkey: 41:15

exactly. It's 100% right. One day, anything else

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 41:20

you want to you want to add for this manifest, I guess.

Grace Sharkey: 41:24

Recap, it's the first day. Here's the recap. Great show. More people here that. Than ever before. A lot of tech companies, a lot of platforms I'm excited to learn more about. And, oh, congrats to manifest two. They've announced their Europe. They're going into Europe. So we potentially, Oracle might be doing that too. So, yeah, I got my passport. Let's do it. You know, awesome.

Blythe Brumleve Milligan: 41:51

Well, that does it for this preview slash recap. Episode for everything is logistics. Hope you all enjoyed this one, and we'll be sure to check out all the other interviews and content that we recorded right in this same booth. So all of those will be posted in the show notes, maybe not all of them, but you know where to go. You know where to find them. Follow the show, YouTube, podcast, wherever you get your content from, especially from everything with logistics and thank you guys for tuning in and go Jags, thanks for tuning in to another episode of everything is logistics, where we talk all things supply chain, for the thinkers in freight, if you like this episode, there's plenty more where that came from. Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you never miss a conversation. The show is also available in video format over on YouTube, just by searching everything as logistics. And if you're working in freight logistics or supply chain marketing, check out my company, digital dispatch, we help you build smarter websites and marketing systems that actually drive results, not just vanity metrics. Additionally, if you're trying to find the right freight tech tools or partners without getting buried in buzzwords, head on over to cargorex.io where we're building the largest database of logistics services and solutions. All the links you need are in the show notes. I'll catch you in the Next episode, in Go Jags, you you.