There has never been a more significant time to run a freight forwarding business. The industry has always operated on thin margins and high headcounts. But the numbers are about to move, and the direction they move depends entirely on when forwarders decide to act.
The economy has been stubborn for decades. Gross margins between 15% and 20%. EBIT, after salaries, systems and overhead, lands somewhere between 1%-5%. 50%-60% of headcount is sitting in the heart of operations. The forwarder structure is widest at the base for a reason: the work demanded it.
That constraint is lifting. Gartner forecasts that supply chain management software with agentic AI will grow from under $2bn in 2025 to $53bn by 2030 – a signal of just how fast the ground is shifting beneath this industry.
The risk is that the industry misreads this moment. The tempting response is to treat it as a cost opportunity. DSV’s integration of DB Schenker is expected to result in up to 13,000 job losses – and the headlines frame it as a headcount story. But that framing may miss the full opportunity. The forwarders who simply cut operations staff will compress their cost base once, then not reap the full rewards.
The ones who elevate their people into higher-value work, and grow into the margin that creates will build something structurally different. This is not a short term cost cutting exercise. It is a growth strategy. Gartner’s analysts describe exactly this shift: simple AI agents freeing up human bandwidth from routine tasks so teams can focus on more complex, higher-value work. The forwarders who act on that logic first will define the new floor for everyone else.
When AI operates as the engine of the business rather than a feature bolted onto it, the forwarder structure inverts. Operations staff stop processing admin and graduate to the work humans do best. Managing relationships, exception management and advisory. The roles that build revenue, deepen loyalty and compound over time. Same headcount. Different work. Different value.
We are already seeing this cascade take hold. Throughput per operator climbs around 40% within three months. Invoice cycles compress. Net margin moves from 3% toward 8%.
From this, something shifts that is harder to put a number on. A strategic choice opens up that simply did not exist before. Lower freight pricing to take market share from competitors still running on the old cost base. Or hold margin and reinvest in growth, in people, in capability. There is no wrong answer. What matters is that the choice is yours to make. That is what separates the first movers from the rest: not just better margins, but a fundamentally different set of options.
None of this works, however, if the underlying system does not truly understand the complex job of an operator. Generic AI tools applied to freight operations miss the nuance that determines whether a shipment moves cleanly or unravels at the border. Documentation, customs, carrier relationships, exception handling: this is not something a horizontal platform can replicate. It has to be custom-built.
Sam Moore, co-founder of FreightSuite, frames it plainly: “The shift is happening at the top. Freight forwarder boards are mandating the move to agentic workflows not because ops teams asked for it, but because the numbers finally made it impossible to ignore.”
FreightSuite was built by freight forwarders who ran the complexities of a forwarding business before they wrote a line of software. That foundation is what makes the difference. The platform is designed as an agentic TMS – purpose-built to understand the full complexity of freight operations at the task level. What changes is where the operator sits within it. Not at the bottom, actioning every step. At the centre, directing a layer of agents that handle the execution while they focus on the decisions that actually move the business forward.
The forwarders who move first are not just improving their margins. They are redefining the customer experience before anyone else sets the standard. That is a rare window, and it will not stay open indefinitely. Gartner predicts enterprise adoption of agentic AI in supply chain software will jump from 5% today to 60% by 2030. The window is real, and it has a timeline.
For forwarders ready to shape the next decade, FreightSuite is a practical and proven place to start. And we’d love to build the future with you.