The Digital Freight Paradox: Why Freightos Discovered That Software Is Only Half the Battle

Supply chain leaders investing in freight digitization platforms need to hear this uncomfortable truth: getting shippers and carriers onto a digital system is the easy part. Making that system actually reduce costs and improve reliability is vastly harder.

Freightos, one of the most visible players in digital freight marketplaces, has learned this lesson through direct market experience. The company's evolution reveals a critical insight that should reshape how organizations approach freight transformation: technology platforms solve the transaction problem, not the structural problem. Automating a broken process just means breaking it faster.

The Technology Mirage

Over the past decade, the freight industry embraced digitization as a fix-all remedy. Platforms promised to eliminate phone calls, automate pricing, streamline documentation, and create transparent marketplaces where supply and demand could match efficiently. And to a point, they delivered on that promise. Moving from email and phone-based booking to API-integrated platforms does create immediate friction reduction.

But here's what Freightos and similar companies discovered in practice: once the digital layer is in place, the actual bottlenecks become visible. They're not technological—they're operational and structural.

A shipper can now book a container in seconds on a digital platform. That's excellent. But if carrier capacity is constrained, if routing networks are inefficiently designed, if pricing models don't reflect true demand signals, and if shipper and carrier incentives remain misaligned, the platform simply exposes these problems rather than solving them. You've built a faster mechanism to execute a flawed process.

The Operational Complexity That Software Can't Fix

Consider what actually happens when freight moves globally. A shipper needs predictable capacity and pricing. A carrier needs consistent volume and operational efficiency. A port needs predictable vessel arrivals and cargo flows. These aren't primarily IT problems—they're operational choreography problems that exist across organizations with competing interests.

Freightos's challenge illustrates three categories of friction that digitization alone cannot resolve:

Demand forecasting opacity. Shippers often don't know their own freight needs far enough in advance for carriers to confidently allocate capacity. Without reliable forward signals, carriers underprovision or overprovide, creating either bottlenecks or empty trucks.

Network routing complexity. Optimizing how freight flows through a global network requires coordination across multiple carriers, freight forwarders, and modes of transport. A digital marketplace can show available options, but it cannot dictate routing decisions that maximize system-wide efficiency if those decisions sacrifice individual party profitability.

Relationship dependency. Despite decades of modernization, freight remains fundamentally relationship-driven. Preferred shipper status, volume commitments, and informal capacity reservations still govern how trucks get allocated. Technology can record these relationships, but it cannot eliminate the friction of negotiating them.

What Supply Chain Teams Should Watch For

If your organization is evaluating or already using digital freight platforms, here's what matters:

Extend your timeline. Implementation shouldn't be measured in months; success should be measured over years. Initial digitization creates visibility wins quickly. Operationally meaningful improvements—improved fill rates, lower demurrage, better capacity utilization—take longer because they require stakeholders to change behavior.

Prepare for governance challenges. The moment your freight operations become data-visible through a platform, you'll discover inefficiencies in your own processes (demand forecasting gaps, routing decisions that don't reflect current costs, etc.). Fixing these requires internal change management, not just platform capability.

Think ecosystem, not platform. Your freight platform is only as valuable as the carrier participation and shipper adoption it achieves. Prioritize network effects over feature richness. A simple platform that your entire supply chain uses beats a sophisticated platform with fragmented adoption.

The Road Ahead

Freightos's experience points to a maturing market. Early-stage digital freight companies won competitive advantage simply by existing. The next wave will be won by organizations that understand freight digitization as supply chain process redesign with a technology layer, not technology deployment to an existing process.

The real value lies ahead, in companies that use their platforms not just to transact, but to reshape how demand gets communicated, how capacity gets allocated, and how pricing gets determined across the entire ecosystem.

Source: PYMNTS.com