President-elect Donald Trump’s technology policies could boost tools used in the freight transportation industry such as AI, automation, cloud computing and more, experts say.
During his most recent campaign, Trump promoted the advancement of technology within the U.S. with the aim of reducing reliance on foreign tech imports. His upcoming administration could likely provide incentives for logistics and transportation firms to invest in AI, automation and other technologies.
From automated warehouses to AI-pricing tools and route optimization, these advancements could enhance venture capital investments and innovation in the freight marketplace, said Cargado CEO and co-founder Matt Silver.
“Venture capital investors seem to be really excited about how regulations are going to loosen up with the Trump administration, and it could lead to more innovation,” Silver told FreightWaves in an interview.
Cargado, launched in January, is a first-of-its-kind, invite-only load board for freight moving into and out of Mexico.
“People are excited about the fact that mergers and acquisitions should open up more,” Silver said. “I think there’s been a lot of commentary in the past about how strict the government’s been with respect to allowing deals or shutting deals down, and that’s not necessarily in the freight industry as much as in the tech space in general. I think the general sentiment right now is that there’s excitement around the opportunity to build technology in the freight industry and the logistics industry.”
One of Trump’s first policy moves regarding technology could be repealing President Joe Biden’s 2023 executive order on AI, which addressed how the technology could pose civil rights, privacy and national security issues, while still promoting innovation and advancements.
“Republicans support AI development rooted in free speech and human flourishing,” according to the 2024 Republican Party platform published in July.
When it comes to AI in the freight transport industry, Silver said he sees all kinds of ways to use the technology.
“My perspective on AI is that it can be used in a lot of things, such as better pricing, or it can be used by brokerages. It can be used the way that somebody like FleetWorks is doing, making inbound phone calls more efficient by using AI large language model-enabled voice technology. Fleetworks’ AI [are] fielding calls on behalf of the brokers and processing that information,” Silver said.
Silver has a long history in both the freight and technology industries. He grew up working at Coyote Logistics, the brokerage his father, Jeff Silver, founded in 2006 and sold to UPS in 2015.
Silver is the former CEO of Forager, a FreightTech startup founded in 2018. The company specialized in cross-border truckload freight matching among the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Silver sold Forager in 2022 to Arrive Logistics.
Silver co-founded Cargado with Rylan Hawkins, one of the founding engineers at Convoy.
“The reality is that AI can be applied anywhere. It can be applied within freight brokerage models, within trucking companies, manufacturing and industrial engineering,” Silver said. “You can use AI to find the best way to transport overdimensional freight, or how to route it, or managing trade compliance and handling tariffs.”
Another freight-related technology that could advance under Trump’s second presidency is automation and robotics. Trump’s first term as president promoted domestic manufacturing, which could prove to be a boon for the automotive, aerospace and industrial industries across the country.
Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation, recently called on Trump to keep the U.S. competitive in automation and robotics.
“The U.S. lags behind many countries in automation, contributing to the loss of 46,000 manufacturing jobs in October alone,” Burnstein blogged on Monday. “While much emphasis has been placed on American leadership in AI, the fact is we are falling behind our adversaries and competitors in the real, physical world applications of AI, such as robotics. Without leadership in the physical manifestation of AI – robotics – the U.S. will not only lose the robotics race, but also the AI race.”
Burnstein said automation could enable the U.S. to be more competitive economically and hire more people in specialized capacities.
“To reclaim U.S. leadership in automation and robotics, we believe our country needs a national strategy, one that not only supports automation technology innovation but clearly addresses the serious supply chain problem of providing a sufficient workforce of technicians and engineers for the robotics and automation industries,” he wrote.
Another technology primed for growth in the freight industry over the next few years is 3D printing, and that is especially true for the maritime industry, according to Fabian Alefeld, head of the Additive Minds Consulting and Academy teams at EOS.
Munich-based EOS offers manufacturing solutions via industrial 3D printing technologies to organizations around the world. Alefeld is based in Austin, Texas.
“I would say [3D printing] is a growing part of the maritime industry,” Alefeld told FreightWaves in an interview. “One aspect is the U.S. Navy has now publicly embraced additive manufacturing as a key technology to speed up submarine parts manufacturing. Matt Sermon, from the Naval Sea Systems Command, has made it publicly clear that the Navy now has the objective to print thousands of casting replacements for current submarine generations. These parts have a long history, and the casting houses just all left. They all went overseas. We can bring them back.”
Alefeld said many of the parts needed in submarine manufacturing were made in China but were export-restricted by the Biden administration.
“You want to do that [manufacturing] in the United States. The only way to do it really is through additive manufacturing,” Alefeld said. “We’ve now qualified six materials for additive manufacturing. The Navy has identified 5,000 applications for surface ships and submarines, and the plan is to ramp up manufacturing quite significantly.”
Alefeld said 3D printing can also help build and maintain parts for ship-to-shore cargo cranes used at U.S. ports. Last year, the Biden administration invested over $20 billion in onshore domestic crane production, partly due to cybersecurity and supply chain concerns over China, which is the world’s largest manufacturer of port cranes.
“If I were one of the ports, I would look at it initially from a maintenance and repair perspective – are there parts that are smaller, some lower-hanging fruits?” Alefeld said. “We see oftentimes, whether that’s in the rail industry or the truck industry, or also in the military, where just because we’re missing one part, a whole system is down. That part can be quite simple. It can be just a small wheel or a valve. Those can be super easily 3D printed, and therefore you can get the system back up and running.”