At the American Supply Chain Summit, Blake Tablak, CEO of Trax Technologies, shared a candid look at how executives can use AI to reduce transportation spend without falling into the traps that come with rushing toward the newest tool on the market. His talk pulled from real client work and his own daily use of AI, framing the opportunity less as a technology problem and more as a question of how leaders ask better questions, clean up their data, and get comfortable with failing their way to the right answer.
Start with the Question, Not the Technology
Tablak opened with a confession that sets the tone for everything that follows. "I am not an early adopter," he said. "I was really comfortable with my BlackBerry. I was really comfortable with my old F-150." His point wasn't that executives should avoid AI. It was that AI only works when it's grounded in disciplined thinking about what you actually need to know.
He laid out three things every executive has to get right. First, you have to understand how to ask the right questions. "How you ask questions and how you train any of those systems is really the difference between winning and losing. Most of the time, they're wrong the first time."
Second is the underlying data. Logistics and supply chain spent years chasing best-of-breed solutions, which means every company is now responsible for normalizing, cleansing, and connecting the outputs from dozens of disconnected systems before any of it becomes usable.
Third is failure tolerance, which Tablak frames as a leadership problem more than a technology one. His team has a saying about living "out on the short branches," where the best ideas grow but the risk of breakage is highest. "If you're out on the short branches, they're going to break, and if, when they break, you beat the snot out of your people and yell at them, they are never going to go out there again. They're going to grab the trunk and be super safe." The implication for AI adoption is direct. Tablak uses an enterprise version of Claude daily, and by his own account, it takes five or six iterations before he gets the right output from any new data set. If executives punish that kind of trial and error, their teams will stop trying.
The Architecture Problem Behind Transportation Spend
The reason most companies struggle to get answers about their transportation spend isn't a lack of data. It's that the data lives everywhere. One provider handles freight audit. Another handles parcel. Another handles ocean. Another covers Europe, another Latin America, another North America. Each is good at their piece, but no one owns the consolidation layer.
"I've talked to a bunch of CFOs who are apoplectic about the fact that they can't get this information," Tablak said. He recounted sitting in a room with one of the world's largest automotive manufacturers, where the CFO asked his head of supply chain how to reduce overall cost. The answer he got was "ship less." A month later, there was a new head of supply chain.
The fix is structural. Companies need to think about three layers: data contributors, data consolidation points, and data consumers. Get those right, and the architecture starts to support real business questions instead of fighting against them.
Four Case Studies in Using AI to Reduce Transportation Spend
Tablak walked through four real client examples, each starting with a question an executive couldn't get answered.
Renegotiating with Misaligned Carriers
At a large industrial manufacturer, the head of procurement wanted longer DPO to create working capital. The head of logistics operations was getting poor performance in certain modes. Within 15 minutes, Tablak's team benchmarked the company's DPO, analyzed the problem lanes, and found that extended payment terms were correlated with the worst-performing carriers. Rates were also out of line with the market. The client didn't need a six-month RFP. They needed a conversation with the carriers they already had.
The Same Package, Thousands of Times a Day
A major consumer technology company wanted to know how often it shipped the same size package between the same two points. The answer surfaced in about 20 minutes: thousands of times a day. "It's gonna be four to seven million dollars in cost ripped out of every one of our distribution points if I make that change," the executive said. Customers were getting five separate packages when they could have gotten one. The company thought it was doing right by the customer. It was actually shifting consolidation costs onto retail partners.
Pricing Customers Who Are Out of Range
A medtech company wanted to know which customers should be charged more for shipping and at what point a surcharge made sense. By analyzing shipment volume and cost by region from each distribution center, the team identified the geographic break points where serving certain customers became economically unviable without a surcharge.
Building a Carrier Performance Index That Matches Your Priorities
Another medtech client used the Trax Performance Index to identify the best carriers across cost, speed, quality, and emissions. "I can tell you who the fastest, cheapest, best quality is, lowest emissions. What I can't tell you is what matters to you. So, you have to tell me." For one client, emissions topped the list until one day cost took over. The index shifts with the business.
The Action Plan for Finance and Logistics Leaders
Tablak closed with three moves. If you're still running multiple freight auditors around the world, consolidate. Look for partners who handle all currencies, modes, and data normalization, and who can surface anomalies before they cost you millions.
When you integrate, don't start with systems. Start with the questions your consumers in finance, accounting, and operations actually need answered. "A well-structured question gets you halfway there."
And adapt in advance. "If you're not failing, you're not trying." Start loading data sets, start asking questions, and accept that you'll get it wrong several times before you get it right.
The opportunity isn't to make freight audit faster. It's to become the person in your organization who can answer questions no one else can. As Tablak put it, "You want to become insatiable to the business."
Want the full session? Watch Tablak's complete talk from the American Supply Chain Summit for all four case studies, the architecture breakdown, and his full action plan. Questions about how any of this applies to your own transportation spend? Contact us today.