FreightWaves Announces 2026 AI Excellence in Supply Chain Awards Winners

The competition this year was fierce. FreightWaves received a record 60 nominations, more than double last year's total, reflecting how quickly AI has moved from pilot projects to production systems across the industry. To capture the full picture of that shift, the 2026 awards were split into two categories: AI Solution Providers, honoring the technology companies building AI tools for the industry, and Operational AI Integration, honoring the carriers, brokers, forwarders and shippers deploying AI inside their own operations.

This year's honorees in the AI Solution Providers category are Arkestro, CloneOps.ai, Intelligent Audit, Fixefy, Augment, Eranova, Gather AI, Trimble Autonomous Procurement, Fullbay AI and Samsara. The Operational AI Integration honorees are NFI, Flexport, YMX Logistics, Uber Freight and Atlas Energy Solutions.

Arkestro earned recognition for its AI-enabled predictive procurement platform, which combines artificial intelligence and game theory to let procurement teams simulate sourcing events before they happen and shape outcomes before suppliers ever submit a quote. Rather than replacing human decision-making, the platform augments it, giving suppliers AI-assisted pricing guidance and real-time feedback on how their offers compare. Customers report an average 18.8% savings on spend and sourcing cycles accelerated by up to 60%. One manufacturer identified more than $55 million in savings with a two-month ROI across 40 plants and more than 400 suppliers; an LNG operator cut high-value sourcing cycles from days to minutes while achieving 29% savings; and a global medical device manufacturer compressed logistics request-for-quote timelines from four months to six weeks, saving $2.4 million.

CloneOps.ai , a repeat honoree after winning in the awards' inaugural year, was recognized for building what it calls an AI operating system for logistics. The platform runs on three connected layers: an AI infrastructure layer providing data stores, connectors and governance; an orchestration layer called ORQIA that turns operational intent into workflow execution; and an agent workforce covering track-and-trace, customer service, dispatch, carrier onboarding, scheduling, collections and fraud prevention. Rather than replacing the transportation management system, CloneOps.ai extends it from a system of record into a system where work actually gets done. ROI modeling across its agent portfolio shows the potential to eliminate more than 133 human hours per 1,000 calls, with representative workflows delivering up to 550% ROI compared with U.S.-based labor.

Intelligent Audit was honored for DeepDetectAI, which applies proprietary machine learning to parcel and freight shipping data to catch cost anomalies, operational errors and potential fraud before they hit the bottom line. The system analyzes a shipper's full history to learn what normal looks like for that specific business, then monitors new activity in real time for unexpected cost spikes, duplicate charges, unusual service usage and potentially fraudulent shipments, with explainable data behind every flag. Customers have seen immediate recoveries reaching six figures from a single recurring issue and total cost avoidance in the millions.

Fixefy received the award for an AI platform that redefines global freight auditing through autonomous financial control. Fixefy ingests any data type from any source, structured or unstructured, including PDFs, images, emails and chats, to reconstruct what it calls the true story of a shipment, then validates every charge against the customer's contracts, rates and standard operating procedures. Its agentic AI does not stop at detection: It autonomously files disputes with carriers and tracks them until credits are issued. The platform is modality-agnostic across air, ground, ocean, rail, courier and third-party logistics spend, and it recovers 5% to 12% of total outsourced supply chain and freight expenditures with 100% audit coverage for enterprises including BASF.

Augment was celebrated for Augie, an industry-native AI teammate that works across phone, email, portals and enterprise systems to automate operations from quote to cash. Augie reads, writes, calls, listens and acts, running workflows modeled on a customer's own standard operating procedures and accumulating institutional knowledge as it goes, all without requiring teams to change how they work. The results are landing with major operators: Penske Logistics is using Augie to validate the status of an estimated 600,000 loads and anticipates productivity gains of 30% to 40%; Transportation One projected seven figures in annualized cost savings; and Hirschbach is now using Augie to handle proactive outreach on more than 85% of its Logistics Solutions loads. Across activated shippers, Augie builds 90% of loads automatically and has cut time-to-proof-of-delivery collection by more than half.

Eranova earned recognition for attacking logistics' most expensive blind spot: the operational data that never reaches the transportation management system. Every load generates a stream of emails, rate confirmations, bills of lading, proofs of delivery and portal updates that operators key in by hand. Eranova connects directly to shared inboxes and communication channels, captures and classifies every message and document, matches it to the correct shipment, and feeds it into a shipment knowledge graph that powers specialized agents across quote intake, carrier tendering, tracking, proof-of-delivery collection, document reconciliation, invoice audit and cash application. The platform handles more than 20 million shipment events annually across more than 50 logistics service providers, capturing 92% of offline shipment data automatically, cutting quote turnaround time 78% and accelerating load closeout to cash fourfold.

Gather AI was honored for bringing physical AI to the warehouse floor, turning facilities into live, actionable data through a software-first, hardware-agnostic platform built on Carnegie Mellon robotics research led by CEO and co-founder Sankalp Arora. Its See, Think, Act model uses computer vision to read more than 10 data points from each image across drones, material-handling equipment and off-the-shelf devices, reasons over that ground truth against existing business systems, and routes the right action to the right person, all without GPS, Wi-Fi or infrastructure changes. The platform delivers 99.9% inventory accuracy and ROI in as little as six months. GEODIS cut manual counting from 4,400 hours a year to 800; NFI reports five times operational productivity; and Langham Logistics reduced pallet emergencies from 20 to 30 per day to one or two.

Trimble Autonomous Procurement took home honors for automating the end-to-end process of securing spot road freight capacity. Planners publish a shipment and set guardrails such as reserve and walk-away prices, and the system continuously makes and adapts targeted offers to pre-qualified carriers using machine learning, behavioral science, historical shipment data, lane patterns and live engagement signals to decide which carrier gets which offer, at what price, and how it should adapt as the market responds. Carriers can describe the loads they want in plain language and move to AI-generated Buy-It-Now offers. The solution reduces rates 7% to 12% compared with freight auctions, enables an 80% no-touch process, secures capacity within an hour with a 90% success rate, and helped Pfeifer Group reach an 84% automation rate.

Fullbay AI was recognized for applying AI across the full commercial repair and fleet maintenance lifecycle, on both the shop floor and the fleet side. Voice-activated notes and AI-powered copy refinement embed directly into the service order workflow, cutting administrative work and producing cleaner records in real time, while Fullbay subsidiary Pitstop uses AI agents and live sensor data to predict maintenance issues before they happen at 95.5% accuracy. Early customer feedback shows roughly a 20% reduction in paperwork time, and on the fleet side the City of Long Beach saves more than $800,000 annually using Pitstop's predictive AI, Food Express cut downtime by 25%, and Summit Materials saves $2,000 per vehicle per year.

Samsara earned accolades for the Samsara Tracking Label and Shipment Center, a smart single-use Bluetooth label that gives shippers near-real-time visibility into mission-critical shipments across any carrier. AI models turn raw Bluetooth location signals into operational intelligence, continuously analyzing position and progress against expected routes to flag weather delays or unplanned diversions before a shipment goes missing. Missing or diverted cargo can now be located in an average of one minute, down from a resolution process that historically took days.

Honoring the supply chain operators deploying innovative use cases of AI inside their own operations.

NFI was recognized for applying AI across its transportation management operation through a build-versus-buy framework prioritizing speed, ROI and customer value. The company replaced manual tracking workflows with agentic AI so associates can focus on exception management, automated email triage and freight bill exception matching in the back office, and built a Digital Twin tool that lets customers dynamically scenario-plan against their own data. NFI has reclaimed more than 100 hours per week in back-office operations, saved the equivalent of four full-time employees in load tracking, cut training time by 20%, and made automated appointment scheduling 75% faster. Its Digital Twin uncovers transportation savings averaging 5% to 10% per customer, with one client realizing more than $600,000 in annual savings.

Flexport was honored for deploying AI not as a product it sells but as the engine of its own operations across ocean, air, customs and fulfillment, launching more than 55 AI and technology products in the past year while moving goods for thousands of brands across more than 135 countries. The approach rests on a unified data spine, an ontology through Flexport Atlas that maps how every entity relates from purchase order to container to customs entry, and automation across the end-to-end supply chain. Customers save up to 10% on ocean freight costs through AI container and route optimization; its customs and duty drawback technology has recovered more than $1 billion in refunds and tariff savings over five years while filing with 99.8% accuracy; and automation has eliminated up to 80% of emails and roughly 20 manual tasks per shipment. One customer grew shipments sixfold with no new headcount.

YMX Logistics took home honors for its Autonomous Yard Operating System, which applies AI to one of the most under-optimized parts of the supply chain: the yard, where transportation, warehousing, trailers, drivers, gates, docks, labor, safety, inventory and EV charging all converge. YMX is explicit that autonomous does not mean replacing people or deploying autonomous trucks. It means using simulation, machine learning, predictive analytics, computer vision and AI cameras to sense yard conditions, forecast demand, recommend decisions and orchestrate workflows, evaluating alternatives before physical changes are made. A top five U.S. grocery distribution network cut its yard truck fleet from 22 to 14, roughly 36%, while improving throughput, safety and control, then expanded the model from one site to nine within six months.

Uber Freight was awarded for DocAI, which automates one of logistics' most stubbornly manual layers: freight paperwork. Embedded directly into Uber Freight's brokerage and financial systems, DocAI uses computer vision, OCR and large language models to read, classify, validate and route bills of lading, proofs of delivery, lumper receipts and invoices in real time, checking delivery details, identifying signatures and handwritten fields, and deciding whether a document can move forward automatically or needs human review. The system processes more than 20,000 proof-of-delivery documents per week at more than 99% precision in data extraction, has driven a 50% reduction in invoice disputes tied to document acceptance, and gives carriers instant notification of an unacceptable document, replacing what was previously a 12- to 24-hour delay.