Around 70 years ago, the trucking and shipping industries were revolutionized with the help of a simple but radical idea – the usage of a shipping container, which was a standardized box and reduced loading/unloading cost by more than 90 percent. Today, the trucking and logistics industry is again going through a dramatic revolution, and this time again, the revolution is driver by a box, but it is a much smaller box and in the truck driver’s pocket.

Advances in smartphones, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are transforming the trucking and shipping industries. In this post, we will discuss the future of the trucking, shipping, and logistics industries.

Huge investments

In the past few years, investors have increasingly taken notice of the trucking industry as deal activity has risen every year since 2013. This raises a question – what attracts investors about the transportation industry and what opportunities do they see? “I think the largest opportunity in the trucking industry is tied to their core asset: trucks,” said Niehenke.

The lack of automation in the trucking industry coupled with truck drivers having smartphones led to ScaleVP’s investment in KeepTruckin, which helps trucking companies manage their fleets and their drivers legally log their hours.

Wesley Chan, Managing Director at Felicis Ventures, said his interest lies in the logistics and supply chain aspects, partially due to his experience at Google Ventures and one of the VC firm’s portfolio companies, Nest.

Job opportunities

Technology for the trucking industry is emerging, either inorganically or organically. Most technology updates come through government regulation, such as with the electronic logging device mandate passed by the US Congress in 2012.

Approx. 90 percent of the trucks in the US are run by small trucking companies, while only 10 percent are larger carriers. Since the US Congress has mandated that every truck be outfitted with an electronic logging device. This ELD mandate creates a tailwind, making every single operator install technology that will make trucks trackable and visible. Furthermore, this will create numerous job opportunities for labor. This more dynamic labor environment will create opportunities for truckers to work closer to home and even work part-time.

Trucking will go 100% digital

We all know that technology has dramatic impacts on the providers in the trucking industry, including brokers that schedule and arrange transportation, carriers that own trucks, and truck drivers. It’s about the customers of the trucking industry who will feel the positive effects in the first place.

Did you know, the current process to book a majority of truckloads involves calling one of the 10,000 freight brokers across the United States, who call around to truck carriers to locate an available truck! It is clear that such a manual task does not result in optimizing the industry’s capacity. There still exists massive inefficiencies