As freight becomes less predictable and customers increasingly automate their requests, drayage carriers need to rethink how they scale customer operations.
Most drayage carriers know exactly how many trucks and drivers they have. But, far fewer can tell you how many customer requests they must answer daily.
At the 2026 JOC Inland Distribution in Chicago and the Virginia Maritime Association's 2026 International Trade Symposium, Anchored, I heard recurring concerns about driver recruitment, regulatory enforcement, unpredictable freight volumes, and rising operating costs.
But there's a hidden cost to all the uncertainty: the growing amount of customer communication required to move freight.
For many mid-sized and regional motor carriers, that work still lives primarily in email. And the conditions that make it difficult to manage are intensifying.
Freight Uncertainty Is Creating More Work for Drayage Carriers
Drayage carriers have always dealt with market cycles, but tariffs, geopolitical conflicts, regulatory pressures, and shifting trade patterns are making capacity planning increasingly difficult.
The National Retail Federation's October 2026 Global Port Tracker illustrates this uncertainty. After earlier expectations that May would be the busiest import month, the peak season extended through the summer, with August appearing to be the busiest month.
But uncertainty doesn't just affect freight volumes. It also generates more customer communication.
When schedules change, capacity tightens, or shipment plans become uncertain, customers request more quotes, confirmations, status updates, and follow-ups. The same container can require significantly more coordination than under predictable conditions.
For carriers, this creates a difficult balancing act. Staffing for peak workloads means carrying excess overhead through slow periods. Staying lean risks slower responses and missed opportunities when activity increases.
Customer operations must become more flexible, yet many carriers still depend on manually processing emails to absorb these fluctuations.
AI Is Adding Another Layer of Pressure
Drayage carriers are also facing a new challenge: their customers are increasingly automating communication.
I've spoken with freight forwarders who are already automating reminders and follow-ups to their vendors. Requests that previously required someone to compose and send an email can now be generated automatically, repeatedly, and at very little incremental cost.
The scale of this shift is becoming visible.
In April 2026, project44 announced that its AI agents had completed nearly one million automated carrier communications across its broader network to help resolve shipment visibility gaps.
This isn't a criticism of project44 or customer-side automation. But it illustrates a broader challenge.
When one company automates its requests, another company may still need people to answer them.
I explored this with Mike DeAngelis on The Frictionless Podcast: automation doesn't always eliminate work. Sometimes it simply shifts that work to another participant in the supply chain.
Combine these two trends, and the problem becomes clearer. Freight uncertainty can increase the number of questions surrounding each container, while AI makes it easier to ask those questions more frequently.
Your administrative workload can increase even when your container volume doesn't.
And while automation on the customer side continues to advance, a carrier's capacity to manually answer those requests remains limited by its available people and time.
The Hidden Cost of an Unmanaged Drayage Inbox
For drayage carriers, treating customer requests as individual emails rather than work that needs to be prioritized and resolved creates three problems.
Operators become overloaded. Time spent searching for information, answering routine inquiries, and chasing outstanding items takes experienced employees away from solving problems and serving customers.
Growth becomes harder. Slow quotes, missed requests, and delayed responses create opportunities for competitors. Even with available trucks and drivers, carriers may struggle to absorb a sudden increase in business.
Costs become less flexible. Hiring additional administrative staff to handle peak workloads increases fixed overhead that remains when freight volumes decline.
These problems don't emerge overnight. They build gradually as customer expectations and communication volumes change.
Carriers that address them early can improve their responsiveness and operating flexibility. Those that continue relying on manual processes may find themselves adding people simply to maintain existing service levels.
How to Scale Drayage Operations Without Adding Complexity
Drayage carriers don't need another heavy case-management system that forces operators to create tickets, update statuses, and learn entirely new workflows.
They need to make the tools their teams already use substantially more effective.
That starts with three priorities:
Prioritize and track. Automatically identify incoming customer requests, distinguish what's urgent from what's routine, and track each request through resolution. Teams should know what's outstanding, completed, or needs attention without manually maintaining another system.
Automate repetitive work. Handle routine quote preparation, status responses, follow-ups, order and milestone entry, and document checks. Keep operators involved where their judgment is needed.
Work where people already work. Use existing email and operational systems rather than requiring new interfaces, major IT projects, or wholesale process changes.
The goal isn't to replace operators. It's to remove repetitive work so they can focus on solving difficult problems, serving customers, and building relationships.
And these improvements don't have to happen all at once. Starting with one high-volume workflow allows carriers to build operational capacity incrementally, without waiting for a major transformation project.
The Next Capacity Advantage for Drayage Carriers
Drayage carriers have spent decades optimizing equipment utilization, driver productivity, routes, and fuel costs. Those will always matter.
But the next competitive advantage may come from how effectively they scale customer operations.
Carriers that can handle more requests without proportionally increasing administrative staffing will be better positioned to capture business during upswings, maintain service quality, and protect costs during downturns.
The opportunity is to build that flexibility while there is still room to improve, rather than scrambling to add capacity when demand returns.
The time to prepare for the next freight surge is before it arrives—not when your inbox is already overwhelmed.
John K Chang is the founder and CEO of IBIS Labs, which helps supply chain teams turn operational communication into action.