This story first appeared in the May 2025 issue of Logistics Management as part of a broader roundtable on AI, automation, and supply chain innovation. In this excerpt, industry experts explain how AI is reshaping transportation management systems (TMS), driving smarter routing, predictive insights, and faster decision-making across supply chains.
LM: From your vantage point, how would you characterize the current state of transportation management for shippers in 2025?
Brock Johns: There’s no shortage of challenges and potential problems for logistics professionals in 2025. I think we can all agree on that. And, as always, it’s difficult to predict what the next issue or challenge is going to be or where it will come from. However, I think the best thing for shippers right now is patience and resilience.
We’re seeing some softening in transportation costs and rates, but with volatility in tariffs and the trade situation that could shift quickly. Shippers need to exercise patience and resist hitting the panic button too quickly. However, being patient does not mean shippers should be passive or inactive. There needs to be strategies in place to deal with the current environment, and that’s where resilience comes in. Do shippers have alternative sourcing strategies? Are there plans to shift production to different locations?
LM: Given these persistent challenges, what would you identify as the top transportation management hurdles shippers will face as we move into 2025?
Johns: What’s interesting is that despite all the news and the various obstacles and challenges that shippers have faced in recent years, things tend to come back down to a handful of big hurdles. Those hurdles are always going to include managing and optimizing costs, improving efficiency levels, and improving visibility.
Transportation leaders are always under pressure in these areas. And with the added pressures this year of tariffs and the potential for an economic slowdown, there will be even more emphasis on cost control. Cost control can also be impacted via better efficiency and increasing automation.
Of course, visibility is also going to continue to be vital. If an organization is shifting its sourcing strategy due to tariffs or utilizing new transportation lanes/carriers, insight into where things are will be critical.
LM: With these challenges in mind, how do you see TMS technology evolving to help shippers stay agile and competitive?
Johns: It’s increasingly difficult to manage the growing complexity with operations in a manual fashion. Many of the TMS solutions available today are designed to help shippers with the challenges we already mentioned—cost, efficiency, and visibility—but they do help companies in other ways.
We touched on sourcing strategies earlier, and if companies need to source from new suppliers or geographic locations, they potentially will need to connect with new carriers. Today’s TMS can ease that process and help facilitate the transportation procurement process. Connecting with carriers via API for real time rates can help a shipper better manage their costs.
TMS solutions are also utilizing AI to automate more of the workflows and processes to drive greater efficiency. Expanding use of GenAI may drive even more efficiency as it will help to streamline the process of gathering and analyzing data.
LM: From what you’re seeing, what are the most immediate and impactful benefits shippers can expect when implementing a TMS?
Johns: We’ve done research on this topic in the past, and, historically, the two biggest benefit areas for shippers have been in transportation sourcing and procurement and transportation planning. We already touched on a bit of the TMS capabilities for procurement, so let’s shift to talk about transportation planning.
When we talk about planning within a TMS, we include a variety of things: load consolidation and optimization; mode selection; carrier and rate selection; continuous move optimization and backhauls; as well as global multi-leg shipment planning.
They key ROI areas for many companies starts at a basic level, using the right carrier and rate. If you have carriers with the best mix of rates and service that are supposed to be used, but someone in the organization is not following the routing guide, that can become a costly issue. The TMS can automate that process and make the decision based on the loaded rates and configuration.
You ship with the right carrier, at the right cost, all the time. The other big piece that drives significant savings is the consolidation and optimization. Shippers can benefit from combining orders to make multi-stop truckloads or making sure that they’re utilizing a higher percentage of the trailer’s capacity.
LM: The market for TMS solutions has grown more competitive, with cloud-based, SaaS, and AI-driven platforms gaining traction. What should shippers prioritize when evaluating TMS options in today’s landscape?
Johns: That’s my favorite question. First off, a reminder to anyone out there looking at a new or replacement solution to do your homework and not rush the decision. The TMS market is competitive with different options out there.
Shippers need to do everything they can to find the best-fit solution for their complexity, requirements and use cases. Use research, industry events, peer networks and any other resources to help get oriented on what is out there.
But when it boils down to what to prioritize, there are really three key categories to focus on: Vendor expertise and viability; product capabilities; innovation and roadmap; and total cost of ownership.
Product capabilities should still be the number one factor for shippers. It’s important to not only identify what’s needed today, but also what capabilities may be needed in the future. We see shippers increasingly putting a focus on a vendor’s product roadmap and the level of innovation that delivered
LM: How are TMS providers incorporating AI into their platforms today, and what does a truly AI-enhanced TMS look like in practice?
Johns: AI techniques really are table stakes within today’s TMS solutions. Vendors have been using AI in some form for years. We’ve seen a rise in interest with capabilities associated with GenAI, and we are starting to see some vendors in the market leaning into Agentic AI.
Agentic AI refers to goal-driven software entities that have been granted rights by the organization to act on its behalf to autonomously make decisions and take action. If we start to think about more “advanced” TMS solutions, those are going to be offerings that have more breadth in their capabilities. This means going beyond core capabilities, such as execution and planning, and providing more advanced functionality such as transportation forecasting and modeling.
Eventually, there’s the potential for a shipper to leverage a solution with more advanced capabilities, but to rely more on AI agents to push transportation management into more of an autonomous, hands-free process.
There’s no doubt that vendors are betting on AI. During our last research cycle, over 50% of TMS vendors had completed some form of AI innovation in the past year. Even more exciting, I think, is that 75% of vendors had innovations involving AI on their roadmaps for 2025.
LM: Many shippers struggle with integrating TMS into their broader supply chain tech stack. What best practices or emerging solutions are making TMS implementation and interoperability more seamless?
Johns: Integration has always been an ugly word. The fact is that it requires lots of planning and hard work to make things work together. And while you mention a shippers’ broad supply chain stack, for most companies it’s a challenge just for their transportation technology stack.
TMS solutions are often working with real-time transportation visibility, multi-carrier parcel, routing and scheduling and other solutions. We’re looking at this and predicted that through at least 2027, 75% of large shippers will struggle to juggle their fragmented transportation application portfolios, despite strategies to support a single solution.
If you’re a smaller shipper that has less complexity, it may be easier for you because you might only need a TMS. However, circling back to the broader stack, you will still likely need to integrate your TMS to an ERP and a WMS. API connectivity is helping ease the implementation and integration burden with a TMS.
The other thing we’re seeing is increased interest in logistics integration platforms. These platforms provide modern, cloud-based, centralized electronic data interchange (EDI) and API-based integration support, leading to more automated business processes with their supply chain partners.
LM: Looking five years ahead, how would you define the capabilities of a truly next-generation TMS? What new functions or breakthroughs will fundamentally change how shippers manage transportation?
Johns: I mentioned last year that larger and more complex shippers will see the TMS as a hub, connected to other transportation technologies. It would be pulling data in and pushing it back out to help orchestrate end-to-end transportation. That is where we’re headed. I think the shift we see now is that AI capabilities, specifically AI agents, could well drive us towards truly autonomous transportation management.
Even for smaller shippers with less complex operations, we’ll see solutions that are designed to support their requirements, but that will automate more of the process. Will we really see shippers leveraging a fully autonomous TMS five years from now? It may sound absurd to some, but I believe we’re inching closer to that as a reality.
