From Buzzwords to Operational Reality: What Manifest Really Felt Like

I’ve been thinking about how to describe Manifest this year, and the only way I can really put it is this: it felt less AI centric and more operational clarity.

Last year the energy was heavily AI-driven, predictive, generative, self-operating, autonomous. And that made sense. AI was still relatively new in logistics, and there was a real sense of curiosity around what it could become. There was excitement in the room. But many of those conversations were still conceptual. The vision was big, but the operational substance wasn’t quite fully formed yet.

AI was still there this year. Of course it was. And some companies are absolutely building toward workforce reduction. That’s real, and pretending it isn’t would be naive. But the dominant tone in the conversations I was having wasn’t “we’re replacing people.” It was much more grounded. It was about removing friction, increasing access and simplifying workflows. 

Rail Innovation That’s Not Just for Enterprise

One of the more interesting discussions I had was with Kevin at GLĪD, and what struck me wasn’t the robotics angle or the AI layer, it was the framing around rail itself. Road freight is easy to access and while expensive and chaotic at times, it’s structurally simple. Rail, on the other hand, feels inaccessible to most small and mid-sized shippers. It exists, it has capacity, but it doesn’t feel designed for them.

At one point Kevin Damoa from GLĪD said, “I think there's a different mindset that people will have to adjust to.”

That line stuck with me because it applies beyond just rail. We’ve accepted certain bottlenecks in this industry as permanent simply because they’ve been around long enough. We’ve accepted that certain corridors are congested, that certain modes are complicated, that certain systems are just the way they are. “It is what it is” mentality. And often the real barrier isn’t the infrastructure itself, it’s how we think about using it.

What I appreciated even more was when the conversation turned to implementation. There was no dramatic “rip everything out and start over” energy. Instead, Kevin said, “And then the next thing is like, do it incrementally. It doesn’t have to be everything all at once.” That feels reasonable and accessible to me.

For SMBs especially, incremental change is usually the only realistic change. Most companies don’t need a sweeping revolution. They need one or two structural friction points addressed so they stop compensating for the same inefficiency over and over again.

Yard Management, the Lost Chronicles

If GLĪD is rethinking how freight moves, Terminal Industries is focused on what happens when freight actually lands in the yard.

In that conversation, one line from Darin Brannan at Terminal Industries summed up a reality most operators already know: “yard operations, yard logistics, is the most unmodernized node in the whole supply chain.” That isn’t a dig. It’s just a fact. Yards are where decades of workarounds quietly accumulated. You typically can’t shut down a yard for six months to redesign the process. Freight keeps moving. So temporary fixes become permanent solutions. Then eventually someone installs software on top of everything without verifying the process and calls it modernization.

But if the workflow underneath hasn’t been examined, you haven’t fixed anything. You’ve just made the chaos faster or more visible.

Another point Darin made in that discussion was that “you’re actually selling change management too.” That’s the part tech companies don’t always emphasize or sometimes even understand. Culture doesn’t automatically adjust just because a platform is installed. If operators don’t trust it, if workflows aren’t fixed and if leadership isn’t aligned, the tool becomes another layer of complexity rather than a helpful solution.

Feedback Loops That Aren’t Just Lip Service

Another conversation that felt so refreshing was with ColdTrack and their client Force of Nature Meats.

There’s a tendency in logistics to talk about partnership in very vague terms. But when you drill into a high-performing perishable program, like the one between ColdTrack and Force of Nature it’s not vague at all. It’s part of the culture of both companies, empathy and understanding are the foundation of their symbiotic relationship.

Luke Vaccaro from ColdTrack was direct about trust: “it isn’t built on a slogan, it’s built on consistent execution.” Rebecca Linz from Force of Nature was even more direct. As a brand, she doesn’t particularly care what label a solution carries. AI, automation, manual process, none of that matters if the order doesn’t arrive on time, correctly packed, and at safe temperature.

ColdTrack talks about execution discipline and daily responsiveness because that’s what perishable freight demands. Force of Nature measures success by customer experience, not by the sophistication of the tech stack behind the scenes.

What I noticed this year is that more companies seem comfortable saying that out loud. They don’t need the story to be sexy. They need their operations to be stable.

Summing it all up

If I step back and look at the week as a whole, what stands out isn’t one announcement or one product launch. It’s the tone shift. The conversations felt less about positioning or hype and more about realistic implementation. Less about what could happen someday and more about what is happening inside operations right now. That doesn’t make for flashy headlines, but it does make for healthier systems.

And maybe that’s the real shift. Not that the industry is abandoning technology, quite the opposite really, but that it’s starting to ask harder questions about how that technology actually integrates into real workflows, real facilities, and real teams. When excitement matures into accountability and execution, that’s usually a sign something interesting is actually happening.