FreightWaves Transparency 2019

Spent the better of a week out at Atlanta, GA attending the FreightWaves Transparency 2019 conference. A conference about innovation, disruption, and digitization in the freight/transportation/trucking industry.

Some quick takeaways:

1. The industry has generally been slow to adopt technology, but in recent years there’s been a huge amount of technology adoption and investment.
2. It’s all about data. Suppliers, carriers, brokers, owner operators, etc… if you’re running your business using Excel spreadsheets, and interested in surviving, you better begin to shift gears and learn how to capitalize on technology. It’s all about freight visibility.
3. The ELD mandate was a major trigger point that forced everyone to use technology, if you weren’t already.
4. Capacity of trucks/drivers, and per mile transport rates, is traded like and is almost as volatile as the stock market.
5. Amazon coming into the shipping industry, effectively selling their excess capacity, poses a major disruption. Look for opportunities to capitalize on your strengths as things shake out.
6. Heavy use of machine learning / artificial intelligence in order to grapple the immense data being generated. Was interesting to see all the companies who have folks in dedicated data sciences roles.
7. Various startups looking to find a way to leverage blockchain technologies (https://dexfreight.io/ gave a cool demo) when it comes logistics and supply chain.
8. Autonomous Trucks – while everyone recognized the rapid progress and investment in the space, it was generally viewed as over-promised and that the reality is that level 5 AV is very far away (10+ yrs). However in 3-5 year term, helping drivers be safer was a key interest. Helps reduce insurance costs, retain drivers, and overall for an industry running on razor thin margins – losing a single truck to an accident is quite impactful.
   1. Anthony Levandowski was interviewed about his approach with his new start up, Pronto (https://pronto.ai/), a company taking an evolutionary approach to self-driving vehicles (start at level 2 at a practical price). He formerly was heading up UBER’s self driving initiative, and created Google’s foundation for AV.
9. Lots of rapid fire product demos!

Though one critique I’d give is that there were way too many panel discussions. Now and then they’re ok, but at Freightwaves that was the general format, and the problem with a panel is the content is completely verbal and there’s no narrative/story to the content. Definitely prefer talks that aim to educate and make a point. One such talk was by keynote speaker David Rowan, UK Chief Editor for Wired Magazine (https://www.wired.com/author/david-rowan/).

He has a new book coming out on innovation that sounds intriguing.

Overall an interesting tech conference focused on a very specific industry.