At TIA this year, carriers were the minority. Freight brokers and 3PLs owned the room.

That’s exactly why Matt Belanus goes. Not to pitch. To listen.

This year, what he heard was different. Less confidence. More urgency. And underneath most conversations, a question the industry hasn’t fully answered: do you actually know who’s moving your freight?

The Market Is Tightening

Capacity is moving back toward pre-COVID levels, driver availability is shrinking — especially in intermodal — and margins are getting squeezed from multiple directions. Fuel costs are up. Payment cycles are slower. And brokers who are stretched thin tend to pass that pressure downstream in ways that don’t always show up in the original rate quote.

For shippers, this isn’t abstract. When the market tightens, the quality of your carrier relationships matters more than it does when freight is easy to cover.

Fraud Is the Biggest Topic — and Nobody Defines It the Same Way

If one conversation dominated TIA, it was fraud. But the word means different things depending on who’s in the room. Double brokering. Wrong carrier showing up. Phantom pickups. General freight security concerns.

“Everyone knows it’s a problem,” Matt noted. “But no one really defines it the same way.”

That lack of clarity makes it harder to solve — and easier for risk to slip through. Strip it back, and the root issue is simple: a lot of brokers don’t know who is actually running the freight once a load is handed off. The dispatcher you’re calling may not know either.

“If you don’t know who you’re working with, that’s where the risk starts.”

In an environment where a single load can be worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, that risk isn’t theoretical.

AI Is Asking Brokers a Hard Question

The other major theme: artificial intelligence — and what it means for the broker’s role.

Brokerage, at its core, is matchmaking. Tools already exist that let shippers find carriers, compare rates, and book freight without a middleman. That function is increasingly automatable.

The brokers holding ground are the ones who can demonstrate something an algorithm can’t: they actually know their carriers. They can tell you who’s driving the truck, where it is, and what happens when something goes wrong.

Trust Is Now a Competitive Advantage

Fraud risk, AI pressure, margin compression — all of it points to the same conclusion: trust is the most valuable currency in this industry right now.

For Mark-it, that’s not a new insight. It’s how they’ve operated across their terminals in Chicago, Kansas City, and Detroit. Asset-based. Independently owned. With dedicated customer service, operations, and dispatch teams — not one person doing five jobs.

What’s changing is how Mark-it leads with it. Matt’s approach coming out of TIA is to front-load that clarity in every conversation: who they are, where the trucks are, how drivers are vetted, what Mark-it does when something doesn’t go as planned.

“If our team can give someone peace of mind right away,” he said, “we’re already ahead.”

The question worth asking your carrier: How well do you actually know them?

It’s simpler than it sounds. And right now, it’s the most important question in the room.

Want to talk through what that looks like in practice? Matt and his team at Mark-it are a good place to start.