We're thrilled to share that Augment had a big week at FreightWaves' Supply Chain AI Symposium in Chicago: Augment was named a winner in the 2026 AI Excellence in Supply Chain Awards, and co-founder Harish Abbott took the stage to share a field guide for turning AI pilots into real ROI.

A symposium built for where the industry actually is

The Symposium billed itself as a high-impact look at the real-world application of AI in global supply chains, bringing seed-stage founders and global enterprise providers under one roof to explore how AI is being embedded into every mile of the supply chain. It's the kind of room where the conversation has moved past the hype. Less "what could AI do," more "what is it actually doing, and is it working?" That shift set the tone for both the awards and the session Harish delivered.

Why Augment won

Augment was recognized as an AI Solution Provider for Augie, our industry-native AI teammate that works across phone, email, portals, and enterprise systems to automate freight operations from quote to cash. Augie reads, writes, calls, listens, and acts, running workflows modeled on each customer's own standard operating procedures and building institutional knowledge as it goes, all without requiring teams to change how they work.

The results FreightWaves highlighted came directly from Augment's customers. Penske Logistics is using Augie to validate the status of an estimated 600,000 loads, with anticipated productivity gains of 30% to 40%. Transportation One projected seven figures in annualized cost savings. Hirschbach is now using Augie to handle proactive outreach on more than 85% of its Logistics Solutions loads. And across activated shippers, Augie builds 90% of loads automatically and has cut time-to-proof-of-delivery collection by more than half.

Augment shared the AI Solution Providers category with Fullbay AI, Intelligent Audit, Gather AI, Trimble Autonomous Procurement, Samsara, and more. A separate Operational AI Integration category recognized NFI, Flexport, YMX Logistics, Uber Freight, and Atlas Energy Solutions for deploying AI inside their own operations, including NFI's Digital Twin tool, which runs on Augment's platform.

From Pilot to Payoff

Harish's session, "From Pilot to Payoff: A Field Guide to Delivering Real ROI with Supply Chain AI," tackled the question every logistics leader in the room is now facing. In 2024, the industry experimented with AI. In 2025, the rubber met the road. Most logistics leaders are now 12 to 18 months into real deployments, and the question has shifted from "should we?" to "is this actually working?"

“Don’t celebrate outreach, celebrate outcomes.” — Harish Abbott

Drawing on AI rollouts covering $50 billion in aggregate freight under management across brokers, carriers, and B2B distributors, Harish walked attendees through a practical framework for telling AI activity apart from AI value, built from time spent on the freight floor alongside the operators actually running these implementations. Attendees left with:

• A simple framework to judge whether an AI investment has delivered value, or just activity

• Why earning operator trust is the ultimate prerequisite to ROI, and what nailing change management actually looks like

• How to think through build versus buy before it costs 18 months of headway, millions in unrecoverable spend, and a difficult conversation with the board

“In 2024 we experimented. In 2025 the rubber met the road,” Harish said. “The teams getting real payoff aren't the ones with the most AI activity, they're the ones who earned trust on the floor and knew when to build and when to buy. That's the field guide we wanted to leave people with.”

It was a good week to be in Chicago, both for the recognition and the chance to share what we've learned putting AI to work on the freight floor alongside our customers. Read more on the award winners from FreightWaves.

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