Freight Matching Goes Truly Digital | Episode 326

SPEAKER_04: 0:19

Welcome back. It's another episode of the Freight 360 podcast. Super excited today. Ben and I, we've got two awesome guests with us. We'll get to in in just a second for a great conversation. If you're brand new, make sure to check out all the other content, including previous episodes where we talk about uh similar topics. We're going to be talking about the convoy platforms integration into Ascend TMS and just the new way that freight brokering is starting to evolve towards. But make sure to share us with your colleagues and friends in the industry. And if you're looking for an educational option, you've got the Freight Broker Basics course available right on our website. Give that a uh a checkout for your team if you're looking to grow and give some educational options for any new team members. Um we've got Bill Draggard with DAT back with us today. Bill, welcome back. How are things? I know we had you on probably five or six months ago. Yeah, thanks for having me back. Well, it's changed since then. Uh last year. We're gonna dig into it. I'm excited for it. But welcome back. Uh, we've also got Tim Haim from Ascend TMS. First time on the show. We've known Tim for a number of years now, but uh Tim sits at the helm of Ascend TMS, our preferred TMS and recommended TMS for new Freight Brokers. So make sure to check out the referral code in the show notes. Use that link. You get 90 days for free of a Send TMS Pro version. But Tim, for those who don't know you and haven't seen your regular posts on LinkedIn and social media, uh feel free to give a quick intro. Then we'll dig more into your background in a little bit here.

SPEAKER_00: 1:48

Yeah, I don't um don't do very many podcasts. I get asked quite a lot, but I just uh I figured that if you want to know anything about me or Ascend, you can watch one of the podcasts I've done. I don't need to keep repeating myself. Um so I you know I appreciate you uh inviting me on. Uh Send TMS is uh probably best known for uh dominating the long tail of the carrier broker shipper spectrum. Um, you know, growing, highly profitable, no debt, stable, um, and we listen to our customers. Customers tell us what to write next. We are their development team. And part of that journey has been working with uh Bill Driegird and the DAT team and and and Convoy platform. Uh and after a year of very hard work, uh, we finally got to a place where I could honestly say that we have a digital transaction model that actually works day in, day out, and it works every time. Awesome.

SPEAKER_04: 2:40

Well, glad to have you on. We're gonna definitely peel back the layers on that one throughout the show today. Uh, Ben, what's going on in uh in Florida today?

SPEAKER_02: 2:47

Much luck going on in Pittsburgh. You were the first person to tell me yesterday that Tomlin resigned. I didn't even know that until I saw the text. I was like in the middle of work and you sent that over, and I was like, I listened to the radio this morning, he was still our coach. Like midday, he was gone, and probably don't have a quarterback next year. So it's gonna be an and there's only like 98 days, I think, into the draft, which is in Pittsburgh. So like we've got three months pretty much before we'll probably have a new coach.

SPEAKER_04: 3:09

So what's yeah, what's walking on? In my so in my home office, I have a TV directly next to me, and I usually have on either national news or ESPN or NFL Network, depending on what kind of mood I'm in and if the Bills won or lost, how far I want to stay away from sports. Um, but I had you know, getting excited for uh the divisional round coming up this weekend, I had NFL Network on. So um I'm in like a million group chats with people too about sports, and I actually saw it like pop up on TV before I even got a text about it, and I immediately was like, oh my gosh, I was like, you know, watching that game Monday night. I remember sitting there thinking like this is arguably the last game that we're gonna see for Aaron Rodgers. I wasn't even thinking about Tommen at the point, at that point, and then you see the the news that after 19 years he steps down. And uh I I will say I'm glad that he did it on his terms and wasn't told you're no longer with this organization the way that like Baltimore uh you know that panned out with Harbaugh. So a lot of coaches, a lot of coaches gonna be looking for new uh new work in the 2026 NFL season. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 4:19

I'd say the only I mean like my biggest it honestly just makes me feel old because like the Steelers have had three coaches, one before maybe he was still good when I was a little kid, but three coaches and though I saw a chart yesterday, it was like three coaches since 1960, whatever, and it compared it to like how many US presidents we've had and how many coaches the Cleveland Browns had.

SPEAKER_04: 4:40

So I think it was like 19 Cleveland Browns coaches versus three for Pittsburgh over the same period. So yeah. Bill, I forget, are you uh are you a big NFL guy?

SPEAKER_03: 4:51

Uh I'm not. I'm relatively sports illiterate. We're uh we're 49ers in a cowboy family. My um from Dallas originally. Okay. But my son's an absolute 49ers nut.

SPEAKER_04: 5:01

So Niners had a nice uh nice showing this past weekend. Tim, how about you? Are you uh are you a football guy now?

SPEAKER_00: 5:08

Only the football you play with the foot. Um this is true.

SPEAKER_04: 5:11

There you go.

SPEAKER_00: 5:12

You know, I figured I figure football, uh, you know, as you call soccer, uh no. I'm in the Tampa Bay area, you know, sports are like soap operas. When uh you know, when we had Tom Brady and and you know, we were kind of going on the Super Bowl runs, you know, that was exciting, and you kind of get drawn into it. But yeah, other than that, I I don't know a lot about the current day-to-day football. Gotcha.

SPEAKER_04: 5:36

Well, it's exciting. I'm a diehard Buffalo Bills fan, and uh I don't know. I feel like the the Bills somehow are are pushing through, and it's it looks like any team that they could go up against, they've got a shot against, but they just seem to have uh a diminishing roster of injured player after injured player. We're down to like three available receivers. Josh Allen has like three injuries on the injury report. I think it lists like his foot, his hand, and his knee, I think. His knee, yeah. Like it's just like the guy, you can't break him, but you just keep injuring him more and more. But whatever. We'll see. We'll see how the uh how everything pans out. So um, all right. Let's uh let's get into this here. I've got a ton of questions. Right before we started recording, I was I was making a mention of this, and I I think I alluded to it when we had you on, Bill, a f a few months back. Was I think it was about 10 years ago when Convoy first started coming into like the discussion and and making um news. I remember writing a a piece on LinkedIn about um you know everyone saying like, oh my gosh, digital freight brokers, you know, the human beings going away. And I wrote like, it I don't think it's happening right now. Like the human still needs to be involved, and there's a lot that needs to happen. But I said I think the way in which we do business is going to change long term. And that happens regardless of whether it's you know digital matching and and the way we procure trucks. I mean, we've seen it with the way that we fight fraud now, right? With um people, no longer are we worried about you know just just double brokering. Now it's you know fraudulent fuel advances and stolen loads and identity theft and all this. So the I think the operational environment in which we do business is gonna continue to evolve. And um, because of that, the way that we conduct business in that environment, um, we need we need to change and evolve. And if we don't, um I think you're gonna find yourself in a different line of work because you're just gonna be behind the ball and behind the curve. So um this news came out uh was it last last week, the convoy platforms integration with Ascend. Can you guys just kind of take us through how this all came to be? And and Tim, I'll I'll say one thing. I I applaud you and Ascend for this is that um you seem to be like the first one that always is like whenever there's a a new option for an integration or a tool, you're like Ascend TMS is gonna have it first. It's kind of like the vibe that I've always seen um as a as a bystander. But can you guys just kind of take us through um how this came to be? And then I'm sure we have a million questions to ask you.

SPEAKER_00: 8:10

Yeah, sure. I let me just say that um we are very picky on what we do. Um, you know, what you just said, uh we get a lot of offers uh from many, many of these new freight tech companies with uh some with great ideas, some with terrible ideas, and they come to us, and I've been in this business a long, long time. All of my team have been in this business a long, long time. Whether it's trucking, brokerage, shipping departments, um, and we've all either owned companies or been heavily involved in the operational side. So we quickly know what will work and what will not work. And so when something comes out, you know, 99% of the time you don't hear about it from us because we know it won't work. Um it's just not got a good ROI for us or for our customer. But one in a hundred, I don't know, one in five hundred, um, somebody presents something to us and we say, This is a good idea, and it's been done by good people that have the resources and the skill set to execute on their side. I'm never worried about the execution on our side. I always want to make sure that the people we work with can not only execute, but they also they have the ability to stay in the game long enough to see rewards uh from all this effort that's done. There's nothing worse for a TMS company or any software company to doing things where the partner eventually gives up themselves or goes away. So, you know, I think it was I've known Bill a long time, and and I think that, you know, about a year, year and a half ago, they came to us and said, you know, we've got this uh technology that we've bought. This was when it was uh part of Flexport. This is what it is. I asked all the right questions. I think Bill gave me like a 60-some page presentation of all of the ways that that this would work from end to end. And he thought about all the forks in the road as a load goes through the process, all the things that could happen. You don't want all those things to happen, but all the things that could happen, and there was an answer for every single thing, and it was all addressed through technology, which has been developed using hundreds of millions of dollars at Convoy. And so um I quickly realized that this is probably the thing that I've been looking for as far as execution of a load from end to end. And um, so we said yes to Bill. Uh it took us literally about a year to get this from the first conversation through all of the SOW statements of work that we had to do, all the diagrams, all of the meetings in order to get this uh through some beta testing. And we finally went live with it just uh a couple of weeks ago. And uh I'm extremely excited because I think it's talking about sports, it's the team that wins the big prize. And I think that we've got a really great winning team with the DAT, all the new executives there, all the new you know, brain cells that have been brought on by Jeff. And uh and I'm I I'm really truly excited about what we're doing.

SPEAKER_04: 11:53

Yeah, you make a good point there. There has uh, and Bill, I'll I'll shift to you on this one. There's been a lot going on uh in the last 12 months at DAT between um the you know factoring, the trucker tools, and now convoy platform. Um I'm I'm curious, like the and we've had we had Jeff on last year, Ben, I think I missed that episode, but um I guess what's the what's like DAT's motivation behind you know making the decision that taking on that much in one year and just not stopping the the foot on the pedal there? Is it trying to differentiate or there's just a lot of opportunity? What's kind of the mindset from DAT's perspective on just going, you know, feed first, jumping right in and just you know, all in on this kind of stuff?

SPEAKER_03: 12:42

Uh yeah, as you touched on most of the most of the executive team is new within the last 18 months, and we made three large acquisitions also tucked in load link uh last year. So it's been a pretty transformative year, and this is it's definitely a new DAT. And there was a recognition, uh, I would say 18 to 24 months ago, that a lot of it there was internal studies, they had a brought an outside consultant, did all strategic review. I think there's just a recognition that where DAT was, they needed to shift to be more of a product uh continual product innovation driven tech company. And it DAT is always uh or historically survived on the strength of the network and just like the density and being in a unique there's network effects to a marketplace, and that drives incredible value for our customers, but and had incremented through products, but it was also clear just what was happening in the market. There's just so much opportunity to push farther, bring more value, drive new services and new capabilities. The uh one of the analogies I always used before was as we were building Convoy, we thought of ourselves more like the Amazon and DT Scraigslist. And the reality is probably somewhere in the middle, but there's clearly like if you just conceptualize the difference there, clearly there's a lot more value we can add in the overall transaction. That was a big part of the convoy acquisition, is building out the end-to-end execution capabilities, being able to automate that. The outgo acquisition is really about financial services and everything that comes with that and how we can invest in that space. And trucker tools is a neutral tracking application. They also had white label load boards, so there's capabilities that also are complementary within that full suite of services. And as we're going into 2026, it's really about okay, now let's package this all up into a the overall DAT automation journey and services journey as we go forward. And now we've kind we've got all the pieces, we've got an incredible engineering team that came along with that too, because the Outgo team, the truck tools team, the convoy team, uh, and all the executives that came along with that. So, yeah, it's it's a very different company. Uh, but at the same time, there's so much incredible tribal knowledge within DAT that they've over 47 years they've done a lot of things right to get where it is. And clearly it's an incredibly valuable solution to brokers and carriers in the market, an essential solution uh to most brokers and carriers in the market. So it's it's really just answering the question how do we drive more value? How do we stay ahead of the game? And how do we continue to innovate?

SPEAKER_04: 14:57

Yeah, that's awesome. Ben, I'm I'm curious because I I'm uh I think to myself, if I look back 10 years when I was newer into brokerage, like I came from the the trucking side and our our software there was literally looked like a an AS4000. I don't even know what it was, but it was it was awful. It got the job done, but like think back to your early days in Broker. Yeah, exactly, right? But you think back to like your early days. We started around the same time, and like the the use of software was like, you know, we used it to stay organized, and we used you know, like DAT, for example, I I would use for capacity and you know, kind of like a a temp check on what the rates are that are being reported, but like beyond that, that was pretty much the the full use case of um a load board network. And I don't tell me from your perspective, like the evolution, and you've dealt with a lot of clients too over the years that you've helped um get started and in evolve and grow their business, but like the what's your take on just the evolution of of tech in the last decade as it pertains to this kind of stuff?

SPEAKER_02: 16:05

Yeah, I mean like our industry, I think, always kind of lags in tech adoption, mostly because there's such disparity, right? Every shipper creates their own procedures based on their own preferences in their own company. They don't communicate with each other even within their own industries. Same with some brokerages and for sure trucking companies. So I think the fact that the market has so many different participants, adoption is a little slower because for brokers, we function across so many different participants, trucking companies, shippers, different softwares that we use. When you were saying that, it reminded me, I remember when I started at TQL. Back then, we didn't, every employee didn't even have access to DAT. In fact, I remember leading the push to have DAT's rating tool into their TMS because they had everybody just live in there.

SPEAKER_04: 16:50

And I remember same thing with us. Yeah. I remember that.

SPEAKER_02: 16:53

And I literally remember, I was probably like a few months in, it was pretty early on, and some a few people on our team had DAT logins. And I was like, well, what are you guys looking at? They're like, oh, we're looking at the market pricing and what's going on. And I'm like, why don't I have that? And then I started looking at our rates versus theirs. And I'm like, I remember going to the IT department and starting to like push to get that integrated. I'm like, there's all this information out here. Like, why don't we have it in the tool you're training to training us to use? And I think there are like some, I guess, proprietary reasons as a company wanted to keep everybody in this one little place so they didn't kind of understand how the rest of it worked. But just having that access made me such a better broker, made me so much better at my job, gave me so much better insight. And that's like the very surface level, right, of like what DAT even did like 11 years ago, right? From there to here, I mean, like you're talking like a world of difference from even in the past 10 years, from how folks used it to how they use it now. And a lot of the capabilities, I think, and this is what we do a lot on our show, is try to expose these things and these tools to folks that like have access to them and just aren't as familiar or don't have the habits of using them as much as they should, because they add a ton of value to everything you do in this industry.

SPEAKER_04: 18:05

Yeah. So to that point, I had a very similar experience. And I want to kind of like explain how things were then, and then I want to I want to go to Bill and talk about, you know, and Tim, you as well, how what it's going to look like now or what it does look like now for folks. So if you go back, you know, 12, 12 years ago when I got into brokerage, um, I remember the company I worked for, one of the reasons that they were like, you know, brokers love to work for our company because, and it was they had the ability to auto-post to DAT. Like that was like the newest, greatest thing. And so instead of having to go onto the DAT website, you could just click a button in the TMS and it posted to DAT. Um, but it didn't pull any truck listings in yet. It didn't have rate view in there yet. And over the years we evolved and those integrations came. Um, but the way that you would book a truck at the time was um we we would go in and sure you'd click the post button so it would go out to the load boards from right within the TMS. And then you're um searching through like company history, like have we ran this low this lane with a carrier, you know, in the recent time frame? And if so, what was the rate on it and how many instances were there? What was the, you know, uh, were there any service values on the carrier? And it was a very, very manual process. And um, you know, typically like the the biggest hurdle you had was trying to keep up with the phone ringing if you had a hot load posted that a lot of carriers were interested in. Um and then over time, like, you know, technology has evolved where now we've got, you know, carrier vetting has gotten to a point where we're not just gonna book any carrier. And now even with like Det's carrier management suite, you can you can restrict what carriers can even see the full details of your company on the posting. Um, you have the ability to book now, like there's all kinds of stuff that's coming now with this full um the full digital transaction. Um, clearly we've come a long way. So I in like you know, breaking it down Barney style for someone that's that's newer to the industry and understands that, yeah, we help find trucks for shippers. How does this actually like break it down like the nuts and bolts? What does the process look like now with the convoy platform to get access to capacity? I'll start, Bill, with you, and then Tim, I'm curious the experience from the Ascend TMS side of it. But Bill, take it away.

SPEAKER_03: 20:26

Yeah, and first I just I love the history lesson a bit because I was actually at Coyote Logistics and spent a lot of time personally doing the integration, pulling all the truck lists out of DAT, integrating rate view into our pricing tools. Um I'll I'll I'll start with just high level how like technology has conceptually evolved. Because back when we were building at Coyote, it was in the four walls, making the internal, like really built for broker workflows and carrier uh sales workflows and AM workflows. When uh Convoy started and the digital freight revolution really kicked off, it was about how do we then look outside the four walls and get into the hands of carriers, get in the and kind of work upstream and also automate that process into it from a broker perspective. So the way that it works, and I'll I'll start with the carrier side, because it really is ultimately the value of the platform. Is bringing this highly engaged automated carrier capacity to brokers that is unique. And as we're now tapping into the full network across DAT, that just continues to expand. From a carrier side, imagine there's it's a whole new experience today than it was 15 years ago. And carriers have, I'd say, been faster to adopt the new workflow and just the way of engaging because it's so easy. You download the Convoy app, you find a load you like, it's listed for a thousand, you say that's not enough money, I'm gonna counter 1200. It said, Great, your bids accepted. You get the rate con automatically, you're tracking it in the app, all the milestones in the app. You can execute end-to-end without ever getting a phone call. By the end, you're uploading the POD, you get paid uh automatically one to two days after confirmation, all that happens within the app, and you can just manage full load execution. So, from the broker perspective, what does that mean? And oh, and the other important thing there is we are monitoring these carriers intently. So there's incredible fraud architecture. So when Tim talked about the 60-page presentation, there's probably 15 pages about fraud.

SPEAKER_02: 22:13

Can I get a copy of that too, by the way?

SPEAKER_01: 22:15

I'm like, as soon as you said that, I didn't interrupt, but I'm like, I would love to read that document. Yes, happy to send you the full uh like full pitch deck.

SPEAKER_03: 22:23

Um as you can imagine, too. Yeah, it was Convoy spent, I think Tim said hundreds of millions, it was a billion dollars of investment, Convoy. Uh you can imagine they had a pretty intense marketing team, so the amount of prior materials that I can I could tap into is incredible. But um, so from the carrier perspective, it's automated from the broker perspective. Then when I a new load hits the board, so this is where like you you touched on being able to hit the the post it now button on DAT, where you can automate how you post uh to the depending on the TMS. And and this is the the beauty of the ascend integration, why it took a year is it's the most automated, most integrated. You know, Tim didn't uh uh touch on this piece too, but it's really he built it so that it can be easy from the smallest carrier to the largest carrier, and so much it's uh totally self-serve uh from a convoy perspective to a degree that's beyond what uh most other TMSs have been able to achieve to this point. But from a broker perspective, I post a load to the platform. I set the max pay. So having worked in a broker, very familiar with max pay, brokers think about max pay very differently. Usually uh the ideal way to set that is your um your shipper rate so you're not losing money a load, because the platform will automatically determine the price and it will try to get the lowest possible price, and it consistently buys well below average market prices, which is another beauty of the platform. Um, because the carriers on that platform, it's owner operators, they run efficiently. The beauty you know, they're staying moving because they're using apps like this, they're app centric, they're getting high asset utilization, so they can, if you find the right match as you know, you can always get it get the best price. So carriers set max pay, they post it to the platform, carrier automatically books it, uh carrier information. This is where the broker has some optionality, whether they auto-accept the uh carrier or they go in and confirm it because they want to go through their own compliance process. But within our platform, we already have served up the broker carrier agreement. So when the carrier signs on to a new broker, they're signing their broker carrier agreement within the application. We've already done, like we already are monitoring their insurance, we already have full, like uh we're monitoring FMCSA scores. So from a compliance perspective, we already have gone through a process internally in terms of carrier vetting. Because if to get on the platform at all, you've got to be a good carrier. But uh broker has options in terms of if they do additional vetting. But once it's on load execution, it's hands-off. Now, every broker has different SOPs, so some like to make phone calls, still get in touch with the driver. They have full control, full visibility to carrier through the process. It's their carrier at that point, but it can all execute through the app. So we also have high resolution breadcrumb data because it's you know, phones these days have incredible GPS resolutions, so they're getting ongoing tracking information on the driver, documents automatically get uploaded and payments automatically executed. So you can be totally hands-off the wheel. This is where this is the beauty of Convoy, as you know, Convoy dog fooded this process in building a broker and was obsessed about automation at every step of the way and achieved incredible levels of automation for every process step. And this just brings that to the any broker.

SPEAKER_04: 25:33

A couple things I want to hit on just real quick, and then Ben, I'll I'll I know you got something to add in. Um so one takeaway, you mentioned it's it's consistently booking below market rate. And a key thing you mentioned there is efficiency. So it's not like a carrier is ultimately netting less money or profit. They're running more efficiently, right? We're talking about less empty miles. These are these are the folks that are looking to optimize their route so that they don't have to drive 200 miles empty. So they don't they don't need to ask for an extra 300 bucks to drive empty to make it worth their while because they're they're planning their route ahead. And the other part, which I think is awesome that you mentioned is um on the carrier's experience, right? They can do this whole transaction without having to you know talk to somebody on the phone. And for some for some people, that is a preference, right? There's there's a reason that if I want something, I might just go on Amazon, hit buy now, and it's at my door in four hours, versus hopping in my truck, driving to Best Buy, looking through and seeing what's available, talking to a kid who may or may not even know what he's talking about as far as his level of knowledge. Um, just the experience of it, it's like it becomes frictionless, becomes the preference for a lot of people, right? Um, absolutely. And there's probably still carriers out there that, or brokers, like you mentioned, they might still pick up the phone because they want that added level of discussion, but it still just makes the kind of the things that we can automate are able to be automated, right? And then you can pick and choose what you still want to manually double tap on. So uh Ben, I wanted to mention those, but what did you have to add in?

SPEAKER_02: 27:07

But yeah, like my two thoughts, right, are like one, it's more efficient both for the carrier and the broker, right? So it's faster and more efficient and allows you to get better pricing because the carrier gets better and more efficient loads with less dead miles, as Nate pointed out, right? And then from the broker side, it's faster to execute and lower lift and safer because you guys are also layering on your protection as well as if a broker can choose to add additional compliance to it. The one question that kind of came to mind is like when you have end-to-end digital transaction with the payment function, how does the app handle like accessorial charges, detention, lumper fees? Does that all in there, or is that a manual process, like in addition to just the standard transaction that goes through automated?

SPEAKER_03: 27:52

Great question. So uh some of those accessorials are automated, but some of them you will still have an uh option to review and approve and uh or dispute on OSD. So uh detention is a good example. So it uh Convoy had built a fully automated detention process because we have high-resolution GPS data, uh, individual facility, you know, polygon information in terms of check-ins, checks, checkouts. But the broker still gets an automatic notification that the detention has been uh entered. So they still have the opportunity to dispute that or or validate it. Uh, but the process itself, in terms of documenting it, can also be fully automated. But they have they have the option of saying yes, no, and still intervening on those processes and have visibility level.

SPEAKER_02: 28:32

And the reason I ask that, and like for listeners out there, is that like sometimes you want it automated and sometimes you don't, right? Because some shippers are like, great, the driver was here, but he didn't sign in, so he doesn't qualify for detention, right? Or the document wasn't executed correctly, and we need to approve it before you can approve it to the carrier, right? So you'll have some customers where you need the manual aspect because it needs to either be conveyed to the customer, approved before you can approve to the carrier, or you have additional standards other than like the driver was physically, like you said, and for listeners, a polygon is basically just a geographic location around the parking lot, right? So, like when the GPS enters that, the system knows this guy was here. However, some shippers say, like, just because you're in your parking lot doesn't mean we know you're here. So you have to go to the gate, or you have to go to the guard, or you need to do some additional step in there before we'll approve it. So I love the flexibility of if you've got an easy shipper to deal with and they're like, if you've done it right, we're good with it, just add it to the bill. But others will require manual process no matter what we do on our end.

SPEAKER_01: 30:50

Yeah, and we have flexibility.

SPEAKER_03: 30:51

So uh we have full automation capabilities on doc approval and review, and we have enabled that with some of our brokers. Uh, I would say the it's about 50-50 in terms of volume. Most like to still approve those individually and go through the process, but all the documentation is presented uh up through the the application so they can um they have access to everything at their fingertips. But some also like to automate it because we have an incredibly efficient process for um just doing doc approval. And of course, we have all the OCR tricks and tools in terms of automatic uh you know character recognition and all that. Uh and so we can automate that. Even if we automate it though, and there's say it's like an OS and D issue, that will be kicked out for manual review.

SPEAKER_04: 31:33

Tim, I wanna I wanna shift to you. So putting yourself in the broker's perspective, now that we have kind of the uh the framework behind how it all works and the carrier's perspective, talk us through the the use case and what is the experience like from a broker's perspective. So they're in the TMS, you know, how are they how are they accessing this capacity? What is their actual um you know experience going through this process?

SPEAKER_00: 32:00

Yeah, so the vast majority of brokers, 99%, when they have a load, they're executing what's called a post and pray process. They go to the three main load boards. Um we support about uh a total of 40 some loadboards. There's a lot of little niche load boards for you know bulk dry or liquids, but the three main load boards that we all know, and they essentially get a load from a shipper. And most shippers do not have routing guides, they do not have you know uh a technology like EDI or API. They're small shippers in in warehouse parks or industrial parks, or they might be a grower of produce or vegetables, or they're a distributor, and they're not very sophisticated. So they use a broker as their outsourced department uh for freight movement. And so they give them Monday, Tuesday, five, ten loads, and instantly the person that gets those loads in that brokerage has to execute a post and prey process. The the likelihood, even if they do have a great driver and carrier in mind, the likelihood of them having an available truck in the right place at the right time is very low. We all know this. So they put the load into a Send TMS, and by the way, the Convoy platform only works in conjunction with a TMS, not just a Send TMS, but other TMSs that they've integrated with uh and will be integrating with. So my competitors eventually will be using the Convoy platform, which should be viewed really as like a conduit between a data conduit or an interpreter. Like, you know, it allows uh uh um me to speak to a Japanese person uh because they're in the middle uh doing the interpretation and and everything is seamless to me. Everything that I speak is English, everything I receive back is English, and they handle all of the interpretation between the broker's load, all the data, and then the ultimate driverslash carrier that's moving the load. So today they post and pray. They put the load into a send, they post it to the three load boards, and they wait. And they just twiddle their thumbs and they hope that the phone rings. And when the phone rings, a whole process starts. Have I done a this load with them before? Are they set up with me? Oh, they are set up with me, but it was three years ago, and now I've got to get them reset up. There's a whole process that takes time and energy. And what they've asked us to do is how can we streamline that process? Minimize the wait, get me better rates when I'm booking freight, allow me to see where the freight is, uh, both both before pickup uh and during uh transit, and allow me to only pick up the phone and talk to people when I want to. Because if nine times out of ten everything's great, let the mechanism just let the conveyor belt just carry on moving forward. And but at first, what we found is people are hesitant. They're like, Well, I'm used to the post and pray process and I'm afraid of trying this new digital thing. And that's why we say I'm willing to pay for the first three loads out of my pocket, out of Tim's pocket, because once you have have experienced the freedom of a digital process, you'll never go back to post and pray again. And somebody, one of my team was speaking to a broker yesterday, and the analogy was it's kind of like we invented the cell phone, and everybody's so used to the landline phones, and they're like, well, why would I want a mobile phone? Why would I want to use a phone that I can use anywhere? And then you say, Well, listen, just try it. Try it for a month, and then see if you want to go back to the landline where you've got a long cord and you know a fixed phone number. And so I think that we're moving through this education process with these brokers to say, we know you're unhappy with the post and pray process and all the manual things that come with it. We have invented, well, Bill and his team have invented a mechanism to be an interpreter/slash conduit between you and one of their tens of thousands of available trucks and drivers that can take this load. And the reason we found is that they can book for under what the market says, is when you post and pray, you'll get 50 phone calls flooding you, and you take the first option, which is the guy 150 miles away, and you're paying$300 a deadhead to drive the 150 miles, which is gonna take four hours at least. And so you've got a time issue and an extra cost issue when you do the post and pray. Bill system says there's a guy 412 yards away at at the same warehouse location around the corner that can come and do this in three hours because he's currently unloading. Let's use that guy. That guy's not gonna charge you 300 extra dollars. He's just happy to drive across the parking lot and to take the load, and it's going generally in the direction he or she wants to go. So that's the advantage of technology. And we've built all these little things within a send that allow you to be able to watch that process. And at any time you can look at the conveyor belt and say, you know what, let me just take this one off the conveyor belt, call, text, message, do whatever you want to be able to just make sure that hey, are you running ahead of schedule? That that place won't allow you to show up before time. Are you running behind schedule? Hey, I can see you're stopped for several hours. Is there an issue? So it allows you to do this this uh uh process of curation within your own network to only spend time on the things that matter and let the technologists handle the things that don't matter because they're just going fine. And um, and we truly believe that this is the future for every single broker, carrier, and shipper, frankly.

SPEAKER_04: 37:25

So let me ask let me ask this. On that note, and I know Bill kind of alluded to it earlier with you know individual compliance um requirements for a brokerage. So, Tim, if I'm using your TMS and I've got a certain set of rules that let's say it's through like highway or something like that, right? And I've got my parameters for um carriers got to hit X, Y, and Z for them to get a green light. Or maybe if they you know hit this uh threshold, it's gonna require a manual review by the team leader or something like that. What does that process look like in your TMS if someone's using Convoy? So Convoy obviously says here's you know here's the conveyor belt with the trucks that are being recommended. Um, but how does that actually then compare it against my vetting requirements for motor carrier selection?

SPEAKER_00: 38:18

So this is how I think this is going to play out. So Ascend today fully supports Highway. Uh actually, we're the only one that has the SMB product for Highway to sell uh an SMB product at an SMB price. Um uh RMIS, uh uh My Carrier Portal, and we have our own called AQV, Ascend um qualification and verification, which is completely free within Ascend. But Bill's uh Convoy platform also has done all their own underwriting, let's call it, of all of the drivers and carriers that are on their platform. You do not get a you do not you're not allowed to be on his platform unless you've gone through a series of underwriting steps to make sure that you are legit and he can tell you about the the very, very teeny tiny amount of fraud that's ever taken place. Um and so I think this is gonna play out in the following way. People will try Bill's platform, Convoy platform, and they will um at first, probably they'll kind of, what did Reagan say, trust but verify? And so they will trust that Bill's got a great carrier, but they're gonna still run him through or her through highway, RMIS, or my carrier portal. And after doing it for so many times with no problem, they're gonna realize that Bill has his act together and the convoy platform did good underwriting. So over time, you probably don't need to double underwrite every carry-on driver because Bill's maybe you just want to do your high-value loads. You might not want to do loads that are 50,000 or less, you know, uh you'll let those go. But if it's a$250,000 uh load of uh electronics or crab legs, maybe you do want to do double underwriting of that driver. So I think over time we're gonna learn to trust uh the Convoy platforms got it right. And um and I think that's the just a natural uh uh way that new digital transformations happen. You try it a few times, it works, you feel comfortable, and then you know you uh you're able to kind of let Bill handle what they do the best.

SPEAKER_04: 40:16

Ben, let me ask you this. So, and then I want to go to Bill on the specifics on how they're doing this, but Ben, and uh from a broker's perspective, what you know, if if you're thinking of this is a new, a new process, a new option of of procuring capacity, what is kind of like your fear or what would be like your hesitation when it comes to the vetting side? Because I I've got a couple of thoughts myself, but you know, just blindly trusting, and I get it, if after a few times you're gonna you're gonna feel more comfortable, but what from your perspective, what are the things that you're like, well, did it check for this? Did it check for this? Did it check for this?

SPEAKER_02: 40:51

So I don't necessarily have fears. I have a lot of thoughts related to what Tim said that are huge benefits to a brokerage from a training perspective, from a negotiation perspective, from a staffing perspective, from a tracking perspective. There's so much in what Tim said that I want to break down in a minute. But to your question, I had a question for Bill, which is what are those? Like, how is that managed or how is that done from a high level? If we're gonna compare like Convoy's vetting standards to what a broker is traditionally using, like you know, Tim named the handful that we're pretty much have been using for the past few years for compliance and things. Trucker Tools has this RMIS, my carrier packets. Like, what and how does Convoy approach this? Is it like bespoke, meaning like they're adjustable for each brokerage? Is this just done carte blanche against the whole carrier base? How and what does that look like? Because I can't answer your question, Nate, until I get a little better understanding of like how it's done and what abilities we have within the tool.

SPEAKER_03: 41:46

Yeah, I'll I'll give a concise overview and then I'll uh that that deck you asked about earlier has slides and slides and slides on this. The the real difference that we have versus any of the other platforms is that we we're managing and executing every one of those transactions. We have full visibility of the carrier, we have device level information, we have a lot more granular data that we can then plug into our we generate a network graph that generates connections between all the different users in our application. And we understand which ones are historically risky or have been identified fraudulent by us or others, and we can flag those. And then we can identify if those same users are reappearing on the platform or showing up in different ways. And then we also, on top of that, That have layered a whole bunch of uh behavioral uh analysis and patterns. We know certain you know types of behaviors that will uh that are fraud like potentially risky. We will do manual reviews. So it's it is a in the end, it's a it's a red, yellow, green uh rating from a carrier and from a user perspective. And if it's yellow, it requires manual review. But that's a very conservative approach. So we have we'll flag it as yellow, our team will go through it, we may request additional information from a carrier. Um, but we do all of these standards it is a one-size, it is a uh standard across the entire network. So we don't have we don't have broker-specific requirements. That's where if brokers have other requirements, they can layer that on top. But most brokers, um, there is a get there is a period to build comfort with it. At this point, we have a significant percent that just view it as a parallel channel because it's also the type of capacity we're bringing. It's small carriers. Um, I fundamentally believe this is the like some of the highest quality capacity because they're small business owners that care about every load. They want the network to be sound as well. Uh, but historically, also it's been a vector for fraud because people buy small MC numbers, they you know the turnover, it's just been a vector of fraud. But if you can eliminate the bad actors, what you're left with is an incredibly high quality pool of capacity. But we have all the standard fraud uh uh uh compliance approaches, but then on top of that, we just have an incredible amount of information, uh you know, where they where they've been, what they've what they've queried, what they've looked at now across the whole DAT network, what loads have I looked at, right? What where have I like all the prior information and user information, which a lot of the platforms don't have, just don't have that same depth of information.

SPEAKER_02: 44:09

Not even close. And and the reason I wanted you to start first, right, is like I've talked with you off air and when this about the convoy app, as well as like Satish before Jeff came in and what they were doing on this on the security side and what the plans were for the roadmap leading up to this over the past couple of years. And like for listeners out there, right, just to like really simplify it, if I'm doing your factoring, meaning like a business for a trucking company, I can see what your banking info is. Not like your account info necessarily is that's important, but like how many deposits and what does that volume of deposits look like compared to how many trucks you have? For example, if you're if you're invoicing for a hundred loads a month, but like you have one truck, right? Like maybe those don't add up. Maybe they do, but like that's one data set. And the more pieces of information you compare, the more secure it is, right? So now I can see is this bank account associated with the person that actually owns the company? Has the MC changed recently? Did the bank account change when the MC changed? Are the right amount of assets listed compared to maybe the insurance, compared to what the FMCSA says, compared to the number of trucks on the road, compared to the number of trucks tracking, compared to the number of invoices? And that's just like a really high level for listeners that, like, even if you have a few of these simple things, it gets safer because you can cross-reference them. And then when you add DAT to it, right? Like anybody that's just even used the search tool to find carriers that have looked for loads that you might not have booked, you can see carriers that have run that lane or want to run that lane because they've been going to the load board looking for that. So that's like a whole other data set that shows like, hey, this carrier is probably legit. They've been looking for this load for the past two years. They've invoiced the right amount, the invoices match the loads they're looking for, the trucks, the number of trucks, and the ownership. Everything seems to pass the sniff test. The more of those data points, the safer it gets, right? And I know like we're not going to dig into like proprietary information or anything, but the reason I wanted to tie all that in for listeners is like when you do that individually through the traditional platforms, there's a huge training hurdle. I can't tell you how many clients Nate and I work with or get into brokers who've been in the industry a long time. And they're like, I don't know which of these to choose because there's dozens of them. And it's like, well, if I move this and make this a requirement, now I'm literally hiring another human being to override half my loads. Well, if I don't do this, well, then maybe I get robbed. Well, which do I pick? And to be honest, all these companies' guidance is basically like start really high, do a lot of extra work, and eventually move them down. Like that is a huge learning curve. It's a huge labor cost, and it's a big risk because even as you're adjusting it, like it's never perfect and you're never going to be able to get it perfect. So to me, having that done by a third party with that amount of information is incredibly valuable to any brokerage shipper or anybody working in the industry.

SPEAKER_04: 46:55

Yeah, well, I'll give you real quick, Bill. I'm sure you can speak to this. One of the uh the carrier reps at my brokerage, he does a really good job at playing devil's advocate whenever we, you know, suggest a new thing to him. He'll always try to pull coles. And one of the things that um I could predict him saying about something like this is um, well, how do I know that? And again, I know we can, you know, you can check it against your own compliance rules, but how do I know if this carrier has that specific VIN, that truck with that VIN insured, and that's not, you know, some quote unquote leased on guy who's not actually under a lease agreement and not actually insured. And oh, the GPS tracking, well, that can get spoofed. So how do we know it's legitimate and all this? So those are like some of the common pushbacks that or fears that I've I've heard people present whenever they hear of a um, you know, a piece of software or a product replacing a human task. And Ben, on top of that, one of the things that we've preached for years is like when in doubt, pick up the phone, right? And and if something, you know, just kind of use your intuition.

SPEAKER_02: 48:01

So trust and verify, like Tim said, right? And that was my other question. You asked me the risks, those are the three that went through my head. Insurance, does it go to VIN level? How do we know the phone is with that driver and that truck? And what are some of the ways?

SPEAKER_04: 48:12

So, Bill, what can you say to those?

SPEAKER_03: 48:14

Yeah. So I'd say there's uh so first thought just to address some of the earlier pieces, I'll say that you still have to like there's still a ton of work, right, just in ground level investigation that goes on. And if I ever I would love to show you at some point one of these dockets that we put together when uh on incidents that it just looks like a CIA file in terms of the deaf information or forensics that are that are applied. Like the in terms of verifying that this is where anything can be spoofed, yes, to your point. So we've seen, yes, people and take the phone or log in within a car, drive to the location, pretend like they delivered and drive away. You've seen those patterns, seen a lot of like photo evidence get um doctored. And fortunately that there are forensics you can do there as well. I will say for each of those, yes, people will try to there, there are uh everybody will always try to be uh find a new vector, which is why you also can't just be static in terms of your approach. You have to continually and if there is a new vector, you have to do the due diligence and do detailed investigation. We have now a unified fraud team, and I will say that um uh our record to date, we've had two thefts out of 800,000 plus loads posted to the platform. Those were new vectors that we were able to quickly shut down uh and work around. I'll just reiterate that it is that comprehensive information that we have across and and again, behavioral patterns. From a phone, and is it the phone with the uh load? And is it is well, we have device level information, we have you know phone information, we could see multiple logins. If they're handing that, I mean there's again, this is where you have to use multiple forensics and check-in.

SPEAKER_02: 49:55

And then all of a sudden you'd be like, well, that doesn't pass the sniff test, and then you dig a little deeper.

SPEAKER_03: 50:00

Yeah, and similarly, like we also have you know fraud, because we're we have broker level fraud through the DAT platform that we are continually uh uh chasing down and evaluating. And similarly, you can it's a different set of patterns there. Um but there's very there's very sophisticated players that are doing like you know, consist like managing tokens across um devices and uh to like for consistent logins and things like that that are just patterns of behavior that imply more sophisticated actors that are like clearly uh applying tools at this, which is also why you have to make the investment. And for a single broker to keep up with it, it's always going to be significantly more difficult than a tech company that's has a dedicated fraud team that we continue to invest in that's identifying the patterns of behavior uh on an ongoing basis.

SPEAKER_00: 50:45

And yeah, if I if I may just make a quick comment, you know, one of the benefits of these network effects and technology just uh writ large is that so you know across a sense tens of thousands of users every day and millions of loads a year. If somebody is moving, uh going to choose a particular driver or carrier or um and and within our network and within Convoy platform, you can see that 28 successful pickups and drop-offs have happened with our customers over the last quarter or year. It doesn't really matter what it is, the likelihood of the 29th pickup and delivery being a fraudulent one is relatively small if you also blend in all of these other metrics that that he and I are measuring. And so, you know, one of the great things about technology isn't just the inherent network effect that 28 other loads for 28 other brokers slash shippers have picked up and delivered with no problems, no claims, clean PODs, you know, that and you're now the 29th person to use them this year. It's probably gonna be okay when you wrap all this other stuff, uh uh, these other metrics together.

SPEAKER_02: 51:53

Well, that's the piece I wanted to tie back into this too, Tim, is that like we talked about like the safety from like convoy with factoring, with tracking, and with that, right? But every broker gets trained like in their first year. Where's the first place you look for a carrier you trust? Somebody that has worked with your business before and you have personal history with them, right? And you not only have personal history of a brokerage, like you said, you have tens of thousands of users using Ascend every day with all of this trusted information that now DAT is able to integrate back through to the Convoy app and say, like, not only does this look safe on all of our vectors, but now you're adding the other vector, and it's a multiplier, right? Because it's not just one brokerage feeding back, it's all of your users and all of their trusted carriers showing how frequently, when, and how long ago has that carrier been trusted with someone else's freight and nothing went wrong. And when you add that, it all of it just gets stronger and more trustworthy. Absolutely correct.

SPEAKER_04: 52:52

I'll add to that too. I think um, and I I try to like recommend this to either leaders or business owners and brokerages like there is always going to be some level of risk and some threat to your business and the work you do, and it's gonna evolve um over time and it'll it'll change, right? And you're never gonna be able to 100% prevent any threat or risk of fraud. It comes down to, in my opinion, what finding your level of comfort. Like it's it's not that you need to have every single available tool out there and then implement all of them because number one, that's not cost effective. Number two, it's not procedurally effective to have to manually have a person go through eight different you know tools that don't all work in conjunction with one another. Um, so it becomes inefficient. So I think you find what is your risk tolerance and you know, what can you at a minimum? What are the tools and and processes you can implement that will mitigate that to a level that you are comfortable with? And um, you know, roll with that and don't get your your mind overloaded with um you know every little thing that could possibly happen. Because if you if you operate in that mindset, you are never going to grow, you're gonna become your own worst enemy. And and I've seen that happen with people where they're you know, they I I from my perspective, I see a really good um carrier to be used, and then someone else is like, well, no, because of X, Y, and Z. And I'm like, okay, well, you're just gonna always find a reason to to try and like play devil's advocate on this. But the reality is we're never gonna be able to do any business if that's the kind of mentality we have. That's just and I get that when you put the two together um with a send and and convoy, you're really you're getting that risk uh level very, very, very, very low.

SPEAKER_00: 54:41

And in the future, insurance providers are gonna say, you know, hey, this is your rate for insurance, whether you're a carrier or a broker getting a bond, this is the rate for insurance if you do it this way. But if you use these tools that we recommend, your rate for insurance will go down because the inherent uh risk for us is a lot less. So people are gonna say, okay, I can pay 10,000 a year per unit over here, or I can pay 3,000 a unit if I use this set of tools. And I think eventually that's where we're gonna end up.

SPEAKER_03: 55:10

Yeah, yeah. I was gonna say we do already have a partnership with reliance partners. That's a discount.

SPEAKER_00: 55:15

There you go. Already done.

SPEAKER_03: 55:17

It's another explanation for us, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 55:21

The thing that I wanted to ask you, Tim, right? Like, is what were some of I guess like the more difficult things to do or the things that took the longest to execute this transaction? The the the integration, sorry, with dat and convoy. And the reason I'm asking this is this is something we've talked about off air. And you and I talk about like every quarter to six months, is every time something new rolls out, you and I usually catch up after a few months. And I'm like, what are you seeing from your perspective? Right. And when all the AI started rolling out and all the TMSs are like, we'll do this automation, we'll do this. And I'm like, I looked at these, Tim, and I'm like, none of it works anywhere close to what they're saying. And it was like the opposite of the old adage of like, they're just overpromising and undelivering. And the reason we've always liked working with you and why we're doing more this year is that like you and I have always talked about the fact that like you're always on the cutting edge, but you're on the side of the cutting edge where you want to make sure it's functional before it's released. And for anybody out there, the reason I think that's so different in logistics is if you do it 99 times out of a hundred faster and better, but you screw up one, you could bankrupt your business. Like our margin of error for adoption and software is just way higher than I think in other industries because you lose, like you said, a$500,000 load of crab. You literally could just bankrupt your brokerage, right? Like you could lose your biggest customer on one load. So if it does not work 100% of the time, you're better off waiting until it gets better, which is one of the things that I think you guys have done really well over the years. And that's why kind of my question is like, I'm really kind of curious, like your thoughts on this, because like you're prudent enough, but you're close enough to that cutting edge that you're offering the things once I think they should be used, not promising them long before they're actually able to be used.

SPEAKER_00: 57:04

Yeah. And this is the problem, you know, with AI, right? Uh, you know, the the inconsistency. And, you know, we, you know, we're a development shop, we run hundreds of experiments to try things. Um, and unless it's, you know, way over 100%, you know, I'm talking about, you know, 999 times out of a thousand is got to be right. And if there is an error on that, you know, one in a thousand, it has to be, you know, very small. We won't go forward with it. I I talked to two CEOs of very large publicly traded transportation uh Behemoths that you would know the names of. And they've been running their own experiments, and they're not having enough success to be able to, you know, it works some of the time, but it doesn't work enough of the time. And so what's the difference between like us and Bill, Comboard Platform DET, all the established players, is that I have a customer base and profits and revenue to protect. I'm not a startup where I'm just gonna spout a bunch of BS and hope that people buy it because I've got nobody to hurt, right? Because I don't have any customers. Take crazy risks with other people's money when you're a startup. I have millions and millions of revenue to protect, millions in profit to protect. So if I put something out there that's all hype and it doesn't work, I'll lose customers, I'll lose revenue and profit. So we personally have had a very hard time over, I don't know, hundreds of experiments trying different things where it's been ready for prime time enough for us to feel comfortable putting it into our customers' hands because I don't want to hurt our customers. That's how we feel about AI right now. We will monitor, we are kind of a little bit, we're fast to uh to work on things we know work, but when we are unsure, we will just hold steady, stay the course, watch things very carefully, and we will not jump too fast because we don't want to make mistakes.

SPEAKER_02: 58:52

That's the thing I wanted to bring into this, right? For like the listener, is that Ascend has been around a long time. DAT, obviously decades, but also Convoy, like we talked about earlier, has been around for a decade, right? So yeah, we're not talking about like not necessarily novel legacy software. We're talking about bringing things together that have a proven track record over years, if not decades, in a way that is mutually beneficial to one, just the user, whether it's the broker or the carrier. But this isn't a novel technology where it's like, hey, we're gonna try this out and see if it works. Like these have been tested over and over. And like Convoy, for example, right, was with Convoy and then was used by Flexport and is now being used in its third iteration. So there have been many people who have had their hands in this and have been working it and have been testing this out over time, as well as Ascend with thousands of users every day. So I really want to get that across to people thinking about trying something new because I think both of your points were really spot on. Getting a human being to change their habits is one of the most difficult, longest, arduous things to do. And I think almost all of business, like anybody that's ever quit smoking, just think of that as an example or get somebody to try to start exercising. It's the beginning of the year. Like that is really hard to get people over the hurdle of what they're doing it the way they've always done. And I really want to get that out there to folks is that like this is not new. These are things we've all been using for a very long time. They're just getting better, more efficient, and more effective at both streamlining the process and preventing the things we're trying to avoid, like fraud and crime, and you know, just literally losing your customers' freight.

SPEAKER_04: 1:00:27

It's kind of like texting if you think about it. Like you go back 20 some years ago, like some people had texting on their phone, some didn't. And then eventually, like, you know, everyone had it, but you might have only had 200 messages a month, and then you had to pay extra. And then it became everyone's got unlimited texting, and then it started to become that people texted primarily instead of calling. And then next thing you know, Apple's got iMessage, and then you've got emojis and memojis, and you've got gifts, and it just keeps evolving and evolving and evolving. And one of the things I I kind of wanted to hit towards the end here is um, with the evolution of technology and freight and the way we procedurally operate, I'm curious. This going to a fully digital operation from both of your perspective, Tim, I'll go with you first. What comes next? Like, what is the, you know, and again, no one has a crystal ball, but I mean you're sitting at the helm of a of a large TMS company. So, you know, what's what's on your mind for the way that we make this more digital, safer, easier to use for the average SMB user or the average broker in general, um, whether it's related to to freight matching, to trucks or not, what is that next wave and something look like?

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:41

I think that this is a a three to five year evolution, revolution, whatever you want to call it, that will move people away from the manual pace and uh post and pre process to a digital process. It'll take time. There will be early adopters, there will be late adopters. But of all of the brokers that have been using this so far, and Bill will attest to this, everybody starts using it slowly, they realize it works, and then the chart is up and to the right as they move more and more stuff to an automated platform because they get better rates, it's more efficient, they spend less time with less fraud. And so it's gonna take an education process to get people to try it, but in three, four years we will laugh at the way that we used to do it. But we're in that that stage of uh of of the kind of the hype cycle where everybody right now has to try it. And so I'll end by just saying this, and this kind of helps our competitors out. You know, there's a lot of there's a hundred to two hundred large brokers, and then there's a very long tail out there that uh we all know exists, mom and pop's uh in middle America. And I will say this is if if you're listening to this podcast and and you're using one of my competitor products, um get an Ascend account, try and move with one cut one of your customers a few loads through the Convoy platform, and if you like it and it works, go to your TMS and then say, call Bill, I need this thing inside my TMS and I need it like yesterday. So, you know, I'm willing to allow you to come into Ascend, use this platform and test it, prove it out for yourself with one customer on 20 loads. And if it works, then you'll have the the data to go to your CEO uh and to get it into your TMS. I'm not saying come to Ascend TMS. I'd love for you to, but you don't have to. Keep using your McLeods and your Mercury Gates and your Blue Yonders, et cetera. But try it out because once you try it out, like the first time you use a mobile phone, you will never go back to the landline again.

SPEAKER_04: 1:03:46

Bill, same question for you on what's what the future holds.

SPEAKER_03: 1:03:49

Yeah, change takes time. I think the brokers that are using this, as Tim said, they use it, they what we see is typically like a three to four month getting comfortable, ramp up, and then they just keep adding more and more and more and scaling over time. And again, using the Amazon analogy, I know I use a l- I do a lot more Amazon shipping today than I did when it first came out. And it's it's it's an easy button. And the other thing, like through the holidays, we saw a huge surge because you can imagine care reps aren't in the office. They're like, great, just put it on, uh put it on convoy. We'll maybe set the rates a little bit higher so that we'll make sure it moves. And our finish rates, which is the percent of loads that move that are posted, went way up through the holidays. And we see that too when things kind of get tight. It's like, well, I'm just gonna hit that easy button more and I get used to it. And it's change management because it's a different process. Just just like you know, we're now in this wave of AI adoption, and we touched on this a little bit. I think that is gonna be a slow implementation there. But clearly we're in this transformative moment over the next five to ten years where freight is gonna become more automated and the back office functions are gonna become more and more automated. And some brokers are gonna be the leading edge, some gonna be trailing a little bit, but change in this space takes so much time, and it's it's a percent by percent by percent. Like there's very rarely, and well, I'd say almost never in our space a tech that will just you know give you a 10x result. It's gonna give you improvements here, improvements there, and those are in load by load, you're gonna see those that benefit, and you're gonna use it a little bit more, and you're gonna get a little bit more efficient. Um I will say that uh, you know, if I if I were a broker, my advice would be to try these things out to Tim's point, try them, just get familiar with them. It's a new way of doing business. It's it is a better way of doing business, and the more comfortable you get with that and familiar, you'll know how it integrates into your own flow. Because even 10, 20 years down the road, brokers are still gonna be here. It's a relationship-driven business. There's small shippers that will always need that help. There's medium shippers that are I mean, all the shippers are always gonna need some outside help, support, uh um capabilities. And I don't see that going away, but the the parts of that business are just gonna become more and more automated and automated around the edges, automated around some of the core freight. And it's just it's just about learn as a broker, just learn it, understand it, know where the the market's going. Uh, you know, I understand some of the early skepticism, but to your point, we're like 10 years in now, it works. Like I can I could show you the hundreds of thousands of examples of of where it works. So uh it's it's only gonna continue growing as a percent of the market in terms of freight automation, digitization, and then around the edges, we're now really AI, you see, chipping into to different workflows as well.

SPEAKER_04: 1:06:25

Yeah, I always I've had this conversation over the years of like what what would be the final end game for our industry? And it's impossible to reach, but it would be 100% efficiency. So always knowing at all times where every single truck is, minimizing the amount of um empty miles, minimizing the amount of load and unload time, um, you know, getting claims and OSD down to zero instances ever, and having 100% predictability on when shipments will occur and what equipment is going to be required to 100% maximize the efficiency for industry. And it's impossible to get to. But we're taking steps to get closer and closer and closer to that super far distant, perfect world through technology. So I I love to see you know the new advances. And um, you know, Tim, you made a point earlier, you get approached by uh software companies and there's some garbage ones out there. And there really, there really is. I mean, Ben, you and I have been pitched, people are like, Yeah, we want, you know, we'd love to sponsor your show. And then we hear about their their thing, and we're like, yeah, I don't want my my company or brand associated with that idea. So um, but that's uh that's kind of my thought on it is you know, getting one step, uh one more step in the right direction towards efficiency in in what we do. Um you never get all the way there.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:49

You know, perfection, yeah. Perfection is a goal that uh unfortunately is unreachable, but you can get closer and closer to it uh incrementally, and these uh marketplaces slash exchanges um will allow us to get there. You know, just like you know, there's a Visa, MasterCard, American Express, you know, uh basically a way to pay for things. There's gonna probably be two, three, four of these marketplaces uh, you know, uh over the next 10 years. Maybe some will specialize in refer and some will be specialized in flatbed or dry, or maybe it'll be done regionally. I don't know. But we will kind of come into a place where there's you know, two, three, maybe four of these leading marketplaces where all transactions happen because it's easier and it's cheaper. And this technology isn't something that is coming. It is here today, right now, and Bill and us and others have proven that it's working. And so uh, you know, I just want to end by saying, try it out. And if you try it out, you'll be amazed about how good it is. And you yourself will then be at the leading edge of where we are. There's a whole generation of newbies coming through, young kids that you know were in high school 10 years ago and now are managers in in brokerages. Uh the old guard, he's retiring. I think that this is gonna be a sea change that's happening in our industry. And uh the technology is already there. So uh I'm excited about the future and I'm excited about brokerage.

SPEAKER_02: 1:09:09

Yeah, the other thing I wanted to add to that, right, is the thing that makes me most excited about this, which is the thing that I loved most about the industry when I got into it, is there's no like economies of scale for a brokerage in a sense, because like I could have a three-person brokerage and I can compete with a TQL, an Echo, or a CH for one customer. No, I'm not gonna do their number of loads. But if I have a tool like this, right, what's the biggest advantage of a huge company? Training and more people. And to Bill's point, if I can press the easy button 10 times to get 10 loads covered faster than 30 people at a big company, I have lower costs, which means I actually have an advantage over the biggest logistics companies in the industry just using a tool like this. And to Tim's point, I think our link is three months free, or is it two or three months free? Three months.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:55

Yeah, we'll do three months of our pro version. Try to send not a penny charge to you. Don't we don't even ask for your credit card?

SPEAKER_02: 1:10:02

Yep. So you can get in, use this tool for free for an entire quarter, right? Try the Convoy app. Tim's gonna pay for to use the first few loads, see how it works. And if you're not getting loads covered faster, you literally risk nothing. You spent no money, and you can go back to the way you were doing it. If it does work, you have a significant advantage over everybody else that isn't at that edge yet, right? And very little risk, if as close to zero risk as you have trying out a new novel technology that's on the cutting edge, I think. Correct. Yeah. Well said.

SPEAKER_04: 1:10:32

Uh, Bill, anything you want to wrap up with?

SPEAKER_03: 1:10:35

No, I think we covered with it or covered most of it. It's um like you touched on, just try it out, right? There's a lot of change happening in the space right now, but be ahead of that. Learn if you're broker or a carrier, right? There's just so many tools available to you. Sometimes it's hard to sort through which what works, what doesn't work. Uh, you've got two platforms here which have you know decade plus of of proof points behind them. And it's just gonna get continue to get better and better and better, right? So like this is the like, you know, the the network keeps growing, the the connections keep growing, that we continue to invest in the tech. Uh at DAT, we're pulling more and more of this together and cohesive, and there's just a lot of good things coming. I'm very excited about 2026. Um plus we're starting to see a little bit of a market recovery. So hopefully, hopefully everybody can count on a few tailwinds this year, which we've been all hoping for. But yeah, it's like it's a it's a very interesting time to be in tech and to be in brokerage, but yeah, keep learning and and test some of the stuff out.

SPEAKER_04: 1:11:33

Yeah, appreciate you being on. Uh Tim, anything to wrap up on your end?

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:37

No, just uh Google or send TMS reviews, see for yourself, uh, give it a try. I don't care uh what size broker you are if you're listening to this podcast and you want to try the convoy platform out. We are the only multi-tenant you know TMS really out there. You know, you don't have to have anything installed, there's no setup, there's no upfront fees to pay, no contracts, etc. So, you know, this is your opportunity to uh get a send, try it with a customer once it blows your mind, and it will. And I don't say that lightly. If you've known many of you have known me a long time, and and you know, I will tell you the truth. Give this a try. And once you realize it works, then you can uh work really hard and getting this this year into your own TMS uh because it is the future, and the future is available right now. Awesome.

SPEAKER_04: 1:12:22

Cool. Ben, any final thoughts?

SPEAKER_02: 1:12:24

Whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right.

SPEAKER_04: 1:12:28

And until next time, go bills.