“Change won’t happen overnight, start with the repeatable predictable workflows.”

A couple of weeks ago I attended Multimodal Birmingham 2026, with freight forwarding tech my main focus (in particular relevant for WiseTech, WTC.AX). And talk about a healthy reality check compared to Manifest which I attended in Vegas earlier this year.

Manifest featured signature keynotes from the likes of Auger (whose tagline is “deploying robotics, AI, and machine learning at unprecedented scale”) and exhibitors such as Pallet (”Pallet runs the entire order lifecycle…”). Venture capital types seemed to outnumber industry insiders as evidenced by the number of Patagonia vests.

Multimodal wasn’t quite a 180, but not far off. My opening quote was from a presenting software vendor discussing their AI functionality and perfectly embodied the sentiment.

AI document ingestion is the biggest tech focus. The machines are definitely not running the show yet.

This industry still runs on the scanned PDF. Just getting data out from scans and into systems efficiently is still a work-in-progress for many operators. And next steps on top of this include getting helpful oversight from software, say, flagging likely errors. But many would-be customers are still in the exploratory phase. Fully agentic, touchless automation isn’t even on the table yet for many operators.

Nor was explicitly monetising AI on the table for many vendors

Vendors mostly talked to AI capabilities on their platform, but not as separate modules or as an upsell.

So how does all this AI investment pay off? Explicitly monetising AI modules or agents, at least for now, doesn’t seem like the path. In other industries I see it being charging by usage. But forwarders already have enough gripes when they can’t estimate their expected software bill, so I see that being tricky here.

Conceptually if software saves forwarders money with efficiency gains, then that software becomes more valuable to the customers, so vendors should be able to monetise that.

But most new TMS launches I see are coming in at cheaper price points than incumbents.

I think still a watching brief here.

Customs is the gift that keeps on giving to software vendors

There is lots of competition from AI and automation vendors in this space, but still so much runway on efficiency opportunity. One panel had questions from the audience (who were hands-on operators) ranging from dealing with expired commodity codes to handling valuation disagreements. What a fiddly industry, what great AI use cases.

Still lots of small, regional-specific brokers. But others are scaling well organically and doing so with technology.

But for the most part technology is letting customs brokers take on more business and grow revenue, rather than just having efficiencies drop straight through to margin on a similar sales base.

CargoWise disruptors?

CargoWise had a big booth that was humming the whole event. Let’s keep things in perspective.

But two names caught my ear.

Firstly, FreightSuite had a good and well attended presentation by its co-founders with an engaged audience.

Below I’ve recreated a graphic from their brochure. Features like quoting are interesting in that these events typically have vendors offering a quoting product standalone.

Also watch for Freightmate AI’s TMS launch later this year. As of now their first product, Docmate, ingests documents, validates the data, and automates core data entry workflows across three automations. A full fledged TMS is coming soon (with an existing customer base to market to).

Both talk to whizzy AI capability but are early days in the scheme of things. FreightSuite had 10 live customers with another 10 onboarding as of March (per Loadstar), with Freightmate’s TMS still launching.

What is CargoWise talking to?

For starters, nothing to do with the e2open acquisition. Fair enough, still early.

More interesting to me is the difference in language from WiseTech investor materials vs customer materials. ‘Some AI smarts in it’ is probably how best to describe the CargoWise customer pitch.

Connections between products / data sources, integrations, efficiencies, visibility - these are the words chosen for customers. Below is a summarised version from their customer brochure.

Compare this to the 2025 investor day, where we have ‘agentic AI personas’ and ‘AI workflow engines’. Here are a couple screenshots from that investor presentation.

Now this may just be semantics. Investors like shiny new terms, fair enough. But it did strike me just how different the messaging is to operators vs the investment market.

And I think this is important for WiseTech because much of the Value Pack messaging was that the one transaction fee creates, well, value, since it bundles in AI capabilities. Eg WiseTech market messaging as of February: “CVP launched with 4 AI capabilities, with ~2-5x increase in usage since launch, with several in the pipeline”.

So are we sitting in front of a pipeline of exciting AI agents (an engine! if you will) all bundled within the flat transaction fee, creating value? Or is this just BAU product development with flashier terms applied? If you’re in-industry and have a view, I would love to hear it.

But on balance for me this conference was a good reminder how gradual this industry can move. Pinching this from the FreightSuite presentation: the Bill of Lading was mentioned in Dracula in the 1800s.

Get in touch if you have views, always happy to chat.