NEWSLETTER
February 2026
Boring Work Compounds
Date
Author
Justin Bailie
IN THIS EDITION:
First freight-tech conference of 2026 (spoiler: a lot of AI booths)
We needed a better audit tool so we built one (saves our team 30+ hours a week)
Excited about a great new customer + integration use case
Where I actually think we are on "agentic commerce"
This past month took me to Vegas and Vancouver, my two favourite cities that start with “V”.
Wait…That’s not true.
Vienna is better than Vegas. So is Victoria. Venice too I’d imagine. Truth is, I’m not a huge Vegas guy.
1. Vegas for Manifest: The Future of Supply Chain & Logistics conference.
A few things stood out.
There are a lot of companies selling “AI for Supply Chain.” right now. Very expensive looking booths. I am not sure what most of them do. A bit of a hammer looking for a nail vibe but I am sure a few will figure it out, exciting times.
The enterprise vendors are clearly on the circuit. Not overwhelmingly but they’re there and they did not used to be.
And the attendance has grown materially. This space is not small anymore and for someone who has been building software in this space for over 15 years, that’s cool!
2. We finished our AI audit engine + it’s already saving our team over 30 hours a week.
We moved off a third-party tool that hadn't seen an update in years. We needed more horsepower and better security for our clients anyway so we built our own.
Shoutout to our Eng team for getting this production ready in 30 days (maybe 28 since Feb is a short one) and also pushing a bunch of automation demos out too. You can watch them here if you wish, not originally intended for public consumption so be kind, but if you know you know and you’ll get why these matter.
TLDR on audit tool: The tool reads messy, unstructured carrier invoices and checks them against quoted pricing and rate logic automatically.
No manual line-by-line reconciliation.
No spreadsheet fuckery.
No squinting at 50 page PDFs files to match bills to quotes to dates to SO’s.
It saves us roughly 30 hours a week right now and it scales.
It's not a headline feature per se but internally it's a killer (in a good way).
We’re looking at whether we can expose a simple client-side version. If you’re managing decent LTL volume (say more than 10 a day) and still auditing freight bills manually, hit me up, I’ll try and get you this tool to try for free. We’re not going to sell it so no harm in trying it out. I just want to further battle test it.
3. We brought on Marco Industries this month.
A really great group of people who align with our lofty vision. We see a lot of opportunities to deliver value quickly here, less email, no more carrier portals, no more inaccurate invoices. Excited to really get in a grove here, we are grateful for the work and the relationship!.
This will also be a chance for us to build our Microsoft Dynamics integration muscles. Dynamics stays in the system of record. We sit inside that workflow and handle LTL execution.
4. There’s a lot of talk about agentic commerce right now.
Maybe it will arrive exactly as predicted. But probably not.
What I see right now is this.
B2B distribution still runs through inboxes, spreadsheets, negotiated pricing logic, and people who “just know how it works.”
Before anyone automates the future, companies still need to get the present right.
We call this “Amazon good.”
Clear pricing logic.
Accurate execution.
Visibility without chasing.
Repeatable reordering.
Exceptions handled cleanly…..And all of it done on the internet.
If you can make your business data legible to a human buyer, you’re also making it legible to any future AI buyer. Both require clean, organized data and consistent workflows.
That’s why I’m more interested in tightening audit logic (as an example) than debating agentic commerce timelines atm. It’s all about the data and work flows baby.