In theory, Google Maps could instantly produce a list of every route you’ve ever driven. The record would be totally accurate — and completely useless, because the only thing you want from that application is the next turn.
Truck-fleet software built the opposite product. It keeps a careful account of every load, stop and mile behind you, but when you ask which of two choices sitting in front of you is the better one, it has nothing to offer.
That was a sensible approach for the era that built it. A carrier in 2010 needed to know where the truck was, whether the paperwork existed and whether the customer had been billed, and the software answered all three questions well. What changed was the input side of the business.
The electronic logging device (ELD) mandate took effect in December, 2017 and put a sensor on every truck in the country. Fuel cards, cameras, maintenance platforms and load boards followed the same path in the following decade. Today. the information required to make a good decision exists in volume, arriving every second from six directions, organized around nothing in particular.
The numbers on this gap are not subtle. A Teletrac Navman survey of 600 companies operating vehicle fleets found 84% running telematics or integrated equipment management, while only 28% described those systems as fully implemented. Seventy-four percent called data accessibility a major obstacle to improving asset utilization, and fewer than half receive live utilization data on most of their equipment. Read those figures together and you get an industry that has finished buying but not seeing. The record improved every year for a decade while the decision stayed where it always was, with an operator, spreadsheet and a Tuesday afternoon.
Here’s the part that gets diagnosed wrong. The decisions that carriers need help with aren’t the obvious ones. A bad lane and a bad rate identify themselves quickly, and most operators were spotting both long before any software offered an opinion on either one. The difficult call sits between good, better and best, which is a comparison rather than a recollection. Choosing which truck takes a load means putting two profitable options beside each other and knowing which one produces more, on this lane, for this customer, in this particular week. A system built to remember can retrieve either answer on request, but was never designed to rank them against each other.
Margins are what turn that distinction into an expensive one. ATRI's 2026 cost report put average operating margins in the truckload and refrigerated sectors below 1% for 2025, with flatbed carriers posting an average operating loss of 0.5%. At one point of margin, the difference between the best and third use of an asset can consume an entire year of profit. The same report priced a truck at $2.52 per mile in the Northeast against $2.23 in the South Central region, while the average truck covered 85,991 miles. Geography alone moved roughly $25,000 of annual cost, and no load confirmation mentions it.
Improving this starts with the decision rather than the software. Name the choice you make most often, whether that’s which truck covers a load, which customer gets capacity next quarter, or which unit gets replaced first. Write down what a person would need in order to rank the top three options honestly, then go find out where those inputs live. Most carriers discover that the inputs do exist, sit in four separate places, and get assembled by someone moving values by hand. That employee is your decision system, and the standard worth holding is the same comparison at truck, driver, trailer, lane and customer level, available in one sitting rather than scheduled a week ahead.
Carriers are right to stay skeptical when a vendor claims that a model handles this whole problem. Plenty of companies will ask a fleet to hand a model the entire operation, and many of those projects will fail, because the company selling the model doesn’t know which parts of this business tolerate automation and which parts do not.
The version that works is smaller and far less interesting to talk about. A bill of lading gets uploaded and posted correctly in three seconds, and nobody in the office needs to know a model was involved. Good technology narrows a choice you were already making, and doesn’t ask for the keys.
The timing question comes down to what a recovery does to attention. Rates are climbing and cost is climbing with them. Carriers who spend the next 18 months deciding at the macro level will make plenty of good decisions, and they’ll never find out what the better ones would have paid. A gap like that doesn’t appear on a statement as a loss. It appears as a competitor who ran comparable equipment on comparable lanes. and closed the year holding more.
Here's a test worth running on yourself: The next time two of your trucks could both cover the same load, pay close attention to how that choice gets settled. If the deciding factor is which driver sits closest or which one you spoke with most recently, that’s not a strategy, and your technology helped you arrive there.
Your trucks will run tomorrow either way, and one of them is going to be in the wrong place. The only variable worth anything is whether something in your business is capable of telling you which one.
Christian Greiner is chief marketing officer at Datatruck.
