When C.H. Robinson’s stock dropped 14.5% in a single day this February, the panic wasn’t really about one company, but about whether AI was finally about to do to freight brokerage what it has already done to customer service and basic coding work.
CEO Dave Bozeman’s answers to investors was reassuring, however – if predictable: scale and proprietary data, he told Reuters, would let large brokers absorb the technology faster than anyone else. In other words, the AI wave would accelerate consolidation rather than disrupt it.
Building large-scale data assets and deep domain expertise, in his telling, takes time that smaller players don’t have.
The story ran in a U.S. context, where a handful of mega-brokers dominate a relatively continuous, single-regulator highway network. However, Asparuh Koev, CEO and co-founder of Bulgaria-based AI logistics firm Transmetrics, works with freight operators across Europe on exactly this dynamic, and he argues the European version of the story has higher stakes – albeit a different shape.
The market is more fragmented, cross-border complexity is greater, and the gap between operators that have invested in AI-driven planning and those that haven’t is already measurable.
The divide isn’t size. It’s data.
“The instinct to assume this comes down to big versus small, because that’s the framing C.H. Robinson used,” Koen stressed to 150sec. “In Europe, that’s not the bottleneck I see. The real divide is data-rich versus data-poor, and that’s no longer the same thing as large versus small.”
He pointed to the structure of the market itself. According to data by the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA), more than 80% of European trucks are registered to fleets of fewer than 10 vehicles, and even after DSV’s takeover of DB Schenker, the five largest carriers in Europe hold less than 6% of the market combined.
“If scale alone decided this, the European market should already look like the U.S. one. It doesn’t, because the access to relevant data – load histories, telematics, rate benchmarks – has stopped being something only the biggest players can afford,” Koev noted.
“Mid-size companies now get it through platforms, integrations, and partnerships. The bottleneck has shifted from ‘who has the data’ to ‘who knows what you do with it. Specifically, which freight to pursue and which to walk away from.”
That reframing matters for strategy, he said, because it means a mid-market broker isn’t necessarily at a structural disadvantage against a giant. “It means a mid-market broker that’s plugged into the right data sources can compete on decision quality, even without the balance sheet of a C.H. Robinson.”
Brokers are turning into “AI-forwarders”
The second shift Koev pointed to is in what a broker’s core job actually looks like:
“Traditional brokerage is built around reacting: a load comes in, you find a truck, you move onto the next one. That model is running out of room,” he said.
“The brokers who survive the next few years will look more like what I’d call AI-forwarders, combining data from TMS platforms, telematics, and freight exchanges to continuously score opportunities, predict profitability lane by lane, and allocate capacity weeks ahead rather than hours ahead.”
This is already happening with operators reacting to volatility rather than getting caught by it. When the Strait of Hormuz tensions hit diesel prices earlier this year, operators that came out ahead were the ones who could re-price lanes and reject unprofitable loads in near real time.
Read more: Survival mode: AI is keeping logistics profitable through the Iran fuel shock
“That’s the AI-forwarder behavior in practice: rejecting bad freight before it costs you money, not after. AI-driven fleets cut empty miles by 15-20% during that period by running continuous what-if scenarios on lane profitability.
A few years ago, that kind of forward planning needed a dedicated data science team. But now, it’s close to standard software.
“Hero dismatchers” are becoming a liability
The third shift is less about technology and more about organizational risk. “Walk into most mid-sized brokerages and freight forwarders, and you’ll find a small handful of experienced dispatchers or planners who carry an outsized share of the company’s actual decision-making,” Koev noted.
“They know which customers to prioritize, which lanes are tight, which carriers to trust. That knowledge has real value, but it doesn’t scale and it’s fragile.”
In a market where rate and demand volatility has become the norm rather than the exception – driven by everything from the 426,000 unfilled driver positions the International Road Transport Union recorded in 2024 to sudden fuel shocks – Koev argued that dependence on a few “hero dispatches” turns an operational risk rather than an asset.
“If that person is out sick, or leaves, or simply can’t process the volume of decisions volatility demands, the company’s performance swings with them. AI tools don’t replace that expertise, but encode it into something the whole organization can rely on – so good decisions don’t live in one or two people’s heads.”
What mid-market operators should actually do in 2026
When asked what this means practically, Koev kept it concrete. “Don’t start with a big transformation project. Start by figuring out where your actual decision bottleneck is; is it data access, or that the data exists but nobody outside two or three people can act on it fast enough? Those need different fixes.”
For data-poor operators, that often means partnering into existing platforms rather than building from scratch. And for data-rich but decision-poor operators, it means investing in tools that turn forecasting and pricing into something the whole planning team can use, not a dashboard one analyst checks once a week.
Gartner market integration data indicates that by the second quarter of 2026, 75% of supply chain management vendors will have been compelled to integrate AI into their platforms just to meet client demand.
This is a sign, according to Koev, that the window to treat this as optional is closing. “Consolidation is coming in Europe, the same way it’s coming in the U.S. But it won’t sort neatly into big versus small. It will sort into operators who can price, plan and decide fast under volatility, and operators who still can’t – regardless of how many trucks either one has.”
Featured image: Getty Images via Unsplash+
Disclosure: This article mentions clients of an Espacio portfolio company.
