In this opening keynote, Covenant Logistics Founder and CEO David Parker reflects on four decades of leadership and resilience across commercial freight cycles. From starting Covenant in 1986 to expanding into a multi-service logistics enterprise, Parker shares key lessons on navigating market downturns, preserving capital, evolving fleet operations, and maintaining a servant-leadership culture through decades of industry change.

Artificial intelligence has moved well beyond conversational chatbots and entry-level automation into the realm of enterprise-grade operations. In this executive fireside chat, Trimble’s Megan Liss outlines the concrete operational gains fleets are achieving through purpose-built agentic AI. The discussion highlights how AI agents—such as the Trimble Arc Agent—can autonomously handle manual back-office tasks including order entry, contract intake, and dispatch workflows while maintaining human-in-the-loop oversight and strict safety harnesses.

This executive discussion reveals how accessible driver care protects health certifications, reduces safety risks, and improves overall fleet performance. Explore how FreightWaves Health is tackling trucking's health crisis by make treatments more accessible, such as GLP-1s directly to the industry, and the impact it has had on these industry leaders.

In a supply-driven freight market defined by fluctuating spot rates and high operating costs, fleet leaders must take a disciplined, data-driven approach to growth and asset management. Truckstop’s Sean Dehan joins FreightWaves to analyze rate-per-mile trends, diesel price volatility, and carrier retention metrics. The session dives into how enterprise fleets can leverage data intelligence and digital dispatching tools to maximize equipment yield and protect profitability.

Millions of hours of driver and truck capacity are lost annually to yard delays and live-loading bottlenecks, challenging conventional assumptions about market capacity. In this session, NoDwell & Spot On Logistics Founder and CEO Blake Lappan focuses on the hidden cost of operational "slack time" and explains how fleets and shippers can unlock latent capacity. He details how deploying flexible local power, drop-and-hook models, and shared trailer positioning allows the industry to move significantly more freight using the assets already on the road.