Logistics gets spooked by AI: Why freight stocks are falling

Traders Union
All News
Editors' Picks
Logistics gets spooked by AI

The market responded with a sell-off

On Thursday, shares of several major trucking and logistics companies unexpectedly fell. Investors began selling after reports about a new AI tool that claims it can reduce inefficiencies across the industry.

RXO saw the biggest drop, down 20.5% in a single day. C.H. Robinson fell 14.5%. Expeditors International of Washington declined by about 13.2%. J.B. Hunt Transportation Services slipped roughly 5%, while XPO lost nearly 6%.

Loading...

The tweet was deleted by the author.

But we saved everything 🙂.

All of these companies are major players in the market. C.H. Robinson and RXO organize freight transportation and act as intermediaries between shippers and carriers. J.B. Hunt is one of the largest trucking companies in the U.S. XPO and Expeditors operate in international logistics and supply chain management.

Against the backdrop of falling traditional players, shares of Algorhythm jumped nearly 30%. The company is promoting its SemiCab platform, which uses AI to reduce empty miles and improve truck utilization. That is what triggered the sell-off.

How AI turned into a threat

Logistics is an industry with many problems. The biggest one is so-called empty miles. Trucks often drive without cargo because shipments are poorly coordinated.

AI promises to fix this. For example, the SemiCab platform claims it can reduce “empty freight miles” by more than 70%. It also says it allows operators to scale freight volumes by 300% to 400% without increasing headcount.

If these numbers are even partly true, the logistics market could change dramatically. Companies that make money from arranging shipments, finding loads, and managing coordination manually may lose part of their revenue. AI can do the same work faster, cheaper, and with far less human involvement.

That is why investors started selling. They are not expecting freight demand to disappear. They are afraid that part of the services — the ones logistics intermediaries are paid for today — could vanish.

Blockchain’s “revolutionary” promises

Not long ago, the industry had similar expectations for blockchain. At the time, many believed the technology would transform logistics: make supply chains more transparent, simplify paperwork, and reduce disputes between participants.

Pilot projects and industry consortia were launched. The most high-profile example was TradeLens, a platform developed by Maersk and IBM. It was supposed to bring supply chain participants into a single digital system.

But widespread adoption never happened. The platform failed to become an industry standard, and most companies continued working the old way. In November 2022, Maersk and IBM announced they were shutting down TradeLens due to a lack of commercial viability.

Loading...

The tweet was deleted by the author.

But we saved everything 🙂.

Panic or the beginning of real change?

For now, it is too early to say that the logistics market is truly changing. Claims of efficiency gains in the hundreds of percent sound impressive, but in reality, adopting new technologies takes years. Large companies rarely rebuild their processes in just a few months.

On top of that, major players can implement similar tools themselves. They have the money, the clients, and the data. If the technology really works, they can buy it, improve it, and integrate it into their own systems.

So the main question is simple: will AI actually reduce intermediaries’ revenues — or is the market once again running ahead of reality? The blockchain story shows that not every “revolution” becomes mainstream.

The stock sell-off is a bet that AI will remove some of the wasted costs in logistics. But for now, it looks more like a reaction to promises and expectations than to a proven industry-wide impact.

This material may contain third-party opinions, none of the data and information on this webpage constitutes investment advice according to our Disclaimer. While we adhere to strict Editorial Integrity, this post may contain references to products from our partners.