Logtech Essentials: From Procurement to Payment

Special Report

Agentic AI to bring outsized capabilities to smaller freight brokers

By William B. Cassidy

Autonomous software tools that can reason, plan, and complete tasks— generally referred to as AI agents— promise to change a broad array of businesses in unexpected ways. In freight transportation, that may include allowing small freight brokers to offer managed transportation services previously available to shippers only from larger third-party logistics providers( 3PLs).

That’ s already starting to happen on a limited scale, according to Robert Nathan, a long-time logistics technology entrepreneur and CEO of Envoy, a freight AI platform.

“ We did not intend when we built our platform for this to happen, but we are empowering freight brokers to now become managed transportation providers,” Nathan said during the Journal of Commerce Inland26 Conference in Chicago.

Using existing software tools and an agentic AI platform,“ these arbitrage brokers... are now able to go upstream closer to the shipper,” Nathan said. Essentially, they can“ fish” in waters that were previously accessible only to those with large-scale transportation management systems( TMS) needed to support managed transportation services.

Going“ upstream” isn’ t a simple stroll, however. First, it requires the development of AI agents that can handle the various functions of a TMS, as well as interact with systems that handle carrier regulatory compliance and other functions for brokers.

“ These arbitrage brokers... are now able to go upstream closer to the shipper.”

“ A lot of brokerages really didn’ t have the manpower or the technology to get in front of those shippers directly,” Glen Stewart, head of brokerage deployments at AI platform Happy Robot, said during an Inland26 panel discussion on agentic AI.

“ A lot of software tools previously couldn’ t really take action. They couldn’ t make phone calls, they couldn’ t put data into systems, they couldn’ t reason about things,” Jesse Buckingham, co-founder of Vooma, another AI agent

36 Journal of Commerce | November 2, 2026 www. joc. com