How could a company worth about $3 Million wipe out more than $17 Billion in transportation market value in a single day?

On February 12th, a press release from Algorhythm Holdings, a company that started its life as a karaoke machine manufacturer, announced that its AI-enabled freight platform SemiCab could reduce empty truck miles by more than 70 percent.

By midday, major logistics firms were down as much as 20 percent. C.H. Robinson, Landstar, J.B. Hunt, railroads, and airlines all felt the shockwave.

If SemiCab's technology works as described, it could reduce waste, lower emissions, and save shippers billions. At the same time, it could compress margins, erode pricing power, and expose just how much excess capacity the freight market really has.

In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly Barner covers:

• The sequence of events: how a small-cap AI announcement triggered a historic sell-off
• The claims behind SemiCab, and how Algorhythm evolved from karaoke to freight tech
• Why reducing empty or "deadhead" miles (which sounds like unqualified good news) could actually hurt incumbent logistics firms

Links:

• Kelly Barner on LinkedIn
• Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter
• Art of Supply on AOP
• Subscribe to This Week in Procurement

"Shipping in 2026 is going to get darker." - Michelle Wiese Bockmann, Senior Maritime Intelligence Analyst, Windward

Right now, somewhere between 900 and 2,000 aging oil tankers are operating in the shadows.

They are carrying sanctioned crude from Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. This so-called "shadow fleet" often sails under false flags, spoofs its locations, turns off monitoring systems, transfers their cargo at sea, and sometimes operates without insurance.

These dangerous vessels are increasingly being boarded, seized, escorted into port, and tied up in court, but enforcement at sea is messy, expensive, and legally complex.

One company… GMS… thinks they have an answer. They believe they can scrap about 100 of these seized, sanctioned ships annually - if (and it is a big IF) they are given permission by the U.S. Treasury to acquire them.

In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly Barner explores three interconnected questions:

• What is actually being done to get shadow fleet tankers off the water?
• What happens to the ships — and the oil, and the crew — after they are seized?
• And what are the second- and third-order effects for global shipping markets, risk, and supply chains?

Links:

• Kelly Barner on LinkedIn
• Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter
• Art of Supply on AOP
• Subscribe to This Week in Procurement

"Capacity reduction is clearly under way. Regulatory enforcement of qualifications and safety standards was arguably the most welcome development in 2025 for our industry." - Adam Miller, CEO of Knight-Swift Transportation Holdings

The trucking industry has been flooded with headlines about enforcement: English language proficiency checks, non-domiciled CDL restrictions, immigration raids, and court stays.

On the surface, this might look like a political story or an emotional response to a few high-profile fatal crashes, but it is not primarily about either paperwork or politics.

It's about freight market capacity. Who is allowed to operate? Where are they willing to operate? Can they operate profitably while following the rules? And how quickly can excess freight capacity be removed without destabilizing the whole system?

In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly Barner covers:

• Why CDL enforcement has become a de facto freight capacity lever
• What the data says about drivers and smaller freight companies leaving the market
• How localized disruption is starting to show up before national trends
• And what we should be watching instead of (or at least in addition to) the headlines

Links:

• Kelly Barner on LinkedIn
• Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter
• Art of Supply on AOP
• Subscribe to This Week in Procurement