FreightWaves Announces 2026 AI Excellence in Supply Chain Awards Winners

CHICAGO — FreightWaves unveiled the winners of its 2026 AI Excellence in Supply Chain Awards during a ceremony at the Old Post Office in Chicago as part of the FreightWaves Supply Chain AI Symposium on July 15, 2026. The awards recognize companies using artificial intelligence to transform supply chain, transportation and logistics operations.

The competition this year was fierce. FreightWaves received a record 60 nominations, more than double last year’s total, reflecting how quickly AI has moved from pilot projects to production systems across the industry.

To capture the full picture of that shift, the 2026 awards were split into two categories: AI Solution Providers, honoring the technology companies building AI tools for the industry, and Operational AI Integration, honoring the carriers, brokers, forwarders and shippers deploying AI inside their own operations.

This year’s honorees in the AI Solution Providers category are Arkestro, CloneOps. ai, Intelligent Audit, Fixefy, Augment, Eranova, Gather AI, Trimble Autonomous Procurement, Fullbay AI and Samsara. The Operational AI Integration honorees are NFI, Flexport, YMX Logistics, Uber Freight and Atlas Energy Solutions.

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display('div-gpt-ad-1709668545404-0'); }); Arkestro earned recognition for its AI-enabled predictive procurement platform, which combines artificial intelligence and game theory to let procurement teams simulate sourcing events before they happen and shape outcomes before suppliers ever submit a quote.

Rather than replacing human decision-making, the platform augments it, giving suppliers AI-assisted pricing guidance and real-time feedback on how their offers compare. Customers report an average 18. 8% savings on spend and sourcing cycles accelerated by up to 60%.

One manufacturer identified more than $55 million in savings with a two-month ROI across 40 plants and more than 400 suppliers; an LNG operator cut high-value sourcing cycles from days to minutes while achieving 29% savings; and a global medical device manufacturer compressed logistics request-for-quote timelines from four months to six weeks, saving $2.

4 million. CloneOps. ai, a repeat honoree after winning in the awards’ inaugural year, was recognized for building what it calls an AI operating system for logistics.

The platform runs on three connected layers: an AI infrastructure layer providing data stores, connectors and governance; an orchestration layer called ORQIA that turns operational intent into workflow execution; and an agent workforce covering track-and-trace, customer service, dispatch, carrier onboarding, scheduling, collections and fraud prevention.

Rather than replacing the transportation management system, CloneOps. ai extends it from a system of record into a system where work actually gets done. ROI modeling across its agent portfolio shows the potential to eliminate more than 133 human hours per 1,000 calls, with representative workflows delivering up to 550% ROI compared with U. S. -based labor.

Intelligent Audit was honored for DeepDetectAI, which applies proprietary machine learning to parcel and freight shipping data to catch cost anomalies, operational errors and potential fraud before they hit the bottom line.

The system analyzes a shipper’s full history to learn what normal looks like for that specific business, then monitors new activity in real time for unexpected cost spikes, duplicate charges, unusual service usage and potentially fraudulent shipments, with explainable data behind every flag.

Customers have seen immediate recoveries reaching six figures from a single recurring issue and total cost avoidance in the millions. Fixefy received the award for an AI platform that redefines global freight auditing through autonomous financial control.

Fixefy ingests any data type from any source, structured or unstructured, including PDFs, images, emails and chats, to reconstruct what it calls the true story of a shipment, then validates every charge against the customer’s contracts, rates and standard operating procedures.

Its agentic AI does not stop at detection: It autonomously files disputes with carriers and tracks them until credits are issued.

The platform is modality-agnostic across air, ground, ocean, rail, courier and third-party logistics spend, and it recovers 5% to 12% of total outsourced supply chain and freight expenditures with 100% audit coverage for enterprises including BASF. Augment was celebrated for