{"slug": "ai-adoption-in-supply-chain-nears-peak-hype-exec-warns", "title": "AI Adoption in supply chain nears peak hype, exec warns", "summary": "Eric Rempel, Chief Innovation Officer at Redwood, warned at FreightWaves' AI Supply Chain Symposium that AI adoption in the freight industry is approaching the Peak of Inflated Expectations and will soon enter the Trough of Disillusionment, citing a gap between impressive demos and real-world deployment. Rempel emphasized that value from AI requires organizational change, not just technology, and noted that Redwood has been hiring due to AI, contrary to layoff headlines.", "body_md": "CHICAGO — The freight industry’s AI investment binge is starting to look like every hype cycle before it. One reason? Excitement is climbing faster than results. Eric Rempel, Chief Innovation Officer at Redwood, told an audience at FreightWaves’ AI Supply Chain Symposium on Wednesday that the industry is approaching Gartner’s Peak of Inflated Expectations, with the Trough of Disillusionment right behind it. Rempel made the comments during a conversation with FreightWaves founder and CEO Craig Fuller, who pressed him on how AI adoption in supply chain compares with the slower arc of digital transformation, a trend that took from 2015 to 2020 to take hold.\n\nFuller opened by noting the volume of capital, both public and private, that has poured into AI. It has also created skepticism from parts of the venture capital world.\n\nRempel didn’t dispute the hype. “I think if you just reference it as one of those Gartner hype cycle curves that Gartner plays out here, we’re on the way up to the Peak of Inflated Expectations, especially in supply chain, and we’re about to go into the Trough of Disillusionment,” he said.\n\nThe gap between demo and deployment is the problem, Rempel said. “There are a lot of AI demos better than anything I’ve ever seen in my entire life. You can put an AI demo together, you can build something wonderful, you can do it for the enterprise, you can do the show. It’s unbelievable.” Supply chain doesn’t run on clean demos, though. “Everything goes wrong all the time,” he said. “If our customers could do it themselves, they wouldn’t need us.”\n\n**AI Adoption in Supply Chain Needs People, Not Just Platforms**\n\nGetting value out of AI isn’t a technology problem anymore, Rempel said. It’s an organizational one. “What it takes is not just a technology lens to get it valuable within your organization, but a people and process lens,” he said.\n\nThat case is complicated by a labor market narrative Rempel pushed back on directly. Despite headlines about AI-driven layoffs, Redwood has gone the other direction. “We’ve only been hiring because of it,” he said. He argued that many of the layoffs making news trace back to pandemic-era overhiring rather than AI replacing workers. “A lot of organizations over-hired in COVID, there was a lot of bloat and waste, and they’ve done RIFs, but those RIFs are for things we just completely didn’t need,” Rempel said. “It’s a great way for a value sheet to say, ‘Hey, we’re producing results and look at what we can do as an organization.’ But I don’t think that’s the end-all, be-all.”\n\n[Spot Market](https://getfreightdata.com/wiki/terms/spot-market?utm_source=fw_article&utm_medium=tooltip&utm_content=spot-market) Jobs, Spot Market Tokens\n\n[Spot Market](https://getfreightdata.com/wiki/terms/spot-market?utm_source=fw_article&utm_medium=tooltip&utm_content=spot-market)Jobs, Spot Market Tokens\n\nFuller drew on a Bloomberg opinion piece to frame the labor shift in freight terms, comparing spot market to contract rates to AI and its pricing. Instead of supply and demand of assets, it’s the supply and demand of available compute and tokens.\n\nRempel sees the same pattern forming in AI pricing. Flat-rate subscriptions are giving way to usage-based costs as enterprises scale up. “The AI in the subsidized era was all [contract market](https://getfreightdata.com/wiki/terms/contract-market?utm_source=fw_article&utm_medium=tooltip&utm_content=contract-market), bigger plans, $20 or $200 a month, you get all this compute,” Rempel said. “That’s very quickly going away, especially at the enterprise level. It’s becoming a spot market, and organizations are rethinking how they staff.”\n\nThat shift is colliding with organizations that move far slower than the technology. “Compute power and capability are shifting every three to six months in experiments, but people take longer to change,” Rempel said. “Instituting change management within organizations is a three-to-five-year journey.”\n\n**Change management and virtual helpers**\n\nFuller shared a change management anecdote about a four hour long morning process to build a newsletter. The challenge was managing resistance to using AI to speed it up, even after seeing dramatically improved output. When the worker had tried the technology three years earlier, they found it lacking, and never went back despite the changes in capabilities. The early first impressions soured the willingness to adapt and revisit.\n\nRempel said the story maps onto adoption patterns he’s tracked for 20 years across TMS and WMS rollouts. “Substitute AI with any change and that’s the narrative,” he said. “There are always folks within the organization who say, ‘I’ve done it this way forever, it’s fine.’ Change is scary. This is why change takes three to five years in organizations.”\n\nThe keynote compared today’s AI tools to a familiar animated archetype. “AI is like the minions from the movie. They have really great intentions, but you need to harness them, structure them, and hold them accountable,” Rempel said. Dumping an open-ended task on a model without guardrails backfires, he added: “The mistake is trying to shotgun it without giving it context or memory.”\n\n**Legacy Systems, New Stakes**\n\nThe conversation turned to whether AI helps or hurts companies built on legacy infrastructure. Fuller pointed to reports that Trimble is selling its transportation business, noting that 80% of the trucking industry still dispatches off green-screen AS400 based systems. Fuller argued AI makes those tangled, interdependent systems more valuable, not less: “AI makes it easier to have the spaghetti of all those interdependent systems talking to each other.”\n\nRempel agreed data, not the interface, is the real asset. “Their ability to flow data in these systems has always been involved,” he said. “I don’t think AI makes this any easier. I think it makes it more important.” He cautioned against applying AI indiscriminately at scale: “We’re talking about massive scale, billions of transactions per month. Using AI to do that is super costly and ineffective if you try to do everything with it.”\n\nThe two also weighed C.H. Robinson’s Wall Street-rewarded AI narrative. “Two things can be true,” Rempel said of the debate over whether it reflects real transformation or cost-cutting dressed up in AI language. “There could be reductions in force, there could be investment in AI, there could be change in process. It’s a journey, not a destination, and they’re well on their journey.”\n\n**Who’s Accountable When the Agent Screws Up?**\n\nAsked what the industry isn’t thinking about, Rempel turned to AI agents as coworkers, not tools. “HR is going to be a function of people and agents,” he said. “If you think about an agent just like an employee, who reviews what they say? Who thinks about customer feedback? Who realizes how they work and how they interact with other employees? What if you have to off-board one? What if you roll back?”\n\nThe deeper question, he said, is whether organizations are ready for knowledge to move horizontally instead of up and down a hierarchy. “Do you have a learning enterprise where this is managed, or are you just building things on top of each other and the whole thing can collapse?” Rempel said.\n\nSupply Chain AI Symposium\n\nPast the hype. Join operators, founders, and enterprise leaders figuring out how to deploy AI in supply chain.\n\n[Register Now](https://live.freightwaves.com/supply-chain-ai-symposium-2026?utm_source=freightwaves&utm_medium=article-widget&utm_campaign=supply-chain-ai-symposium-2026)\n\nF3: Future of Freight Festival\n\nIndustry-defining keynotes, rapid-fire technology demos, and industry leaders networking in experiences across Chattanooga - plus the inaugural F3 Awards Dinner featuring the FreightTech and Shipper of Choice reveals.\n\n[Register Now](https://live.freightwaves.com/f3-future-of-freight-festival-2026?utm_source=freightwaves&utm_medium=article-widget&utm_campaign=f3-future-of-freight-festival-2026)\n\nPast the hype. Join operators, founders, and enterprise leaders figuring out how to deploy AI in supply chain.\n\nThe Old Post • Chicago, IL[Register Now](https://live.freightwaves.com/supply-chain-ai-symposium-2026?utm_source=freightwaves&utm_medium=article-widget&utm_campaign=supply-chain-ai-symposium-2026)\n\nIndustry-defining keynotes, rapid-fire technology demos, and industry leaders networking in experiences across Chattanooga - plus the inaugural F3 Awards Dinner featuring the FreightTech and Shipper of Choice reveals.\n\nThe Signal at Chattanooga Choo Choo • Chattanooga, TN[Register Now](https://live.freightwaves.com/f3-future-of-freight-festival-2026?utm_source=freightwaves&utm_medium=article-widget&utm_campaign=f3-future-of-freight-festival-2026)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-adoption-in-supply-chain-nears-peak-hype-exec-warns", "canonical_source": "https://www.freightwaves.com/news/ai-adoption-supply-chain", "published_at": "2026-07-15 18:30:36+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-15 19:03:48.912914+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Eric Rempel", "Redwood", "FreightWaves", "Craig Fuller", "Gartner"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-adoption-in-supply-chain-nears-peak-hype-exec-warns", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-adoption-in-supply-chain-nears-peak-hype-exec-warns.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-adoption-in-supply-chain-nears-peak-hype-exec-warns.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-adoption-in-supply-chain-nears-peak-hype-exec-warns.jsonld"}}