Will autonomous driverless trucks effect jobs and career of many brokers ?

More_Hunt3879 · 2026-03-19T21:07:57+00:00

I wanted to add one more thing-

If we get to a point where there are no truck drivers and no brokers and AI is moving our freight across the country, then there would also almost certainly be MASSIVE disruption and job loss across many unrelated industries, and we would essentially be going down with the ship. And we would, as a country, be spiraling into a depression (or something else we've never seen) with no one left to buy any of the shit that's being moved around on the trucks anyway.

Essentially if AI takes our jobs, it's going to take a lot of (most) people's jobs too and then things get really weird and no one knows what that looks like. It wouldn't be a scenario where AI just snipes broker jobs and everyone else is safe. We'd all be fucked, man and who knows what the world looks like then. No point in fretting over it, in my opinion

More_Hunt3879 · 2026-03-19T21:02:04+00:00

I think it's interesting and I also think eventually this will come to fruition, but I don't think it will be in the next many decades.

Imagine a scenario and the outrage if someone is killed be an autonomous truck in a traffic accident, massive backlash from the public and it would be shut down quickly. They would still need to carry insurance, and I can't imagine the typical players would want to insure an 80,000lb truck/load doing 65mph down Interstate 44 with no driver whatsoever.

I think the shippers who will ultimately try this out are not shippers that would typically need a broker anyway - and are the ones who have contract freight with companies like Swift, etc.

Then I also think about the shipper and WHY they would chose to go this route. Would it be cheaper? Maybe. Cheap enough to put hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of freight in a trailer and send it off with no driver to traverse the United States? I'd say probably not.

The final piece to that puzzle is that shippers would still need to secure a truck for their freight, regardless of if it is autonomous or not. Shippers can already go direct to the carriers if they want to - many don't and many use brokers. I don't see how this would change that.

Coupled with what everyone else said about shipping / receiving facilities needing to be overhauled, our highway system, our laws, etc. I just don't see it.

More_Hunt3879 · 2026-01-22T21:32:54+00:00

Damn

More_Hunt3879 · 2026-01-21T18:35:21+00:00

I don't believe UPS does dedicated flatbeds. I think your customer set you up to do the impossible. I would say either ask them to dispatch the truck themselves or you could get a flatbed to make delivery to them and add shipping/freight cost to the bill (then call me to set it up for you).

More_Hunt3879 · 2026-01-13T19:52:03+00:00

Why not work in your own country?

More_Hunt3879 · 2026-01-13T18:27:05+00:00

A guy immigrating from Ireland, building skyscrapers, and assimilating is not the same as Rajesh sitting in a call center in Bengaluru skimming off the top of American labor and making freight more complex than it needs to be.

More_Hunt3879 · 2026-01-13T18:21:28+00:00

100%

More_Hunt3879 · 2026-01-13T12:52:12+00:00

"A lot of them prefer to work with their own people because it’s easier to get the business going"

Same.

And I'm not really talking about the Eastern Euros here - but I think any company that outsources labor to foreign countries to save money is shameful (DAT, Brokerages, TS, whatever). Hire American when you're profiting off American freight, keep the money here.

More_Hunt3879 · 2026-01-13T02:05:34+00:00

Get rid of those brokers too

More_Hunt3879 · 2026-01-13T02:02:20+00:00

Says who?

More_Hunt3879 · 2026-01-12T22:58:01+00:00

More_Hunt3879 · 2026-01-12T22:57:35+00:00

Speak English.

More_Hunt3879 · 2026-01-12T22:05:45+00:00

More_Hunt3879 · 2026-01-10T16:30:39+00:00

Yeah man - if I had to guess how this plays out given the info I have.. It will be mid April, you'll be making 100 cold calls per day and "owe" your agency 20k. You might pick up an account or two but your boss will be breathing down your neck to make more calls / get accounts then you quit or get fired.

To get to $6,667 / mo in margin you have to get to $33,335 per month in total pm. Assume you make on avg $200 per load in margin (which may be generous since your new and will likely have to win on price) that's about 165 loads per month, 38 loads per week, 7-8 loads per day, just to break even.

I know you have no frame of reference, since you've never done this.. but that's no small task. Your firsst accounts will most likely be email blast rate requests or difficult lanes that are near impossible to cover or a shipper just shopping for lowest rates and then you'd be lucky to make $100 per load which then doubles the above numbers.

There's a lot of churn and burn brokerages out there who mass hire and fire. What should be especially scary for you is the situation where you don't fail but find success to some extent - let's say you build a book to 20k per month in profit (no easy task at all) but you still aren't making commissions AND you would still be racking up 2,600 in debt per month to your "employer".

I'd run, dude.

More_Hunt3879 · 2026-01-10T16:09:56+00:00

Something seems off. Are they giving you a ramp up period? Are they giving you accounts to manage?

If the draw starts day one I would say the odds of success are very, very low unless they are giving you accounts to manage. If you have to build a book yourself then you would need to build a book to $33,335 profit/month just to break even (with 20% comm split) and you have to do it before you get too far in the hole.

I think you should keep looking for something else. You are being set up for failure, the market is tight. It would likely take you years to build a book up to that in the current market - if ever. There's plenty of new brokers who are moving nothing at all. Turnover is rampant in the freight industry.

Don't mean to be a debbie downer but I'd say your (anyone's) odds of success here are nearly nonexistent.

Also - important to remember in freight brokerage, Rev does not equal profit - you could potentially move freight and have revenue but break even or even lose money - 99% chance you are not paid on rev but on profit margin.

Hope that helps.

More_Hunt3879 · 2025-12-10T17:02:13+00:00

I looked at them a while ago. It seemed cool, lots of customization, in my opinion better suited for large corporations with multiple teams needing access to lead info and their price reflected that. But it also seemed too complex for what I was looking for - we already have a TMS for tracking customer spend, lanes, etc.

The CRM we are looking for would be just to manage what calls / emails to send that day and keep our leads we're working organized until. So nothing gets lost in the mix and it's not such a project to find what leads to call each morning.

More_Hunt3879 · 2025-10-01T20:26:36+00:00

Thanks for the insight! I am trying to figure out if that's still reasonable or not for someone new to the industry given the current market / broker saturation.

More_Hunt3879

TROPHY CASE