Industry
Distribution & Logistics
10 pieces on The Craft of AI tagged with Distribution & Logistics — across The Brief, the Failure Museum, and the Playbooks.
The Brief — 7 issues
Oilfield AI Cut 35% of Trucks. Zero Layoffs
Liberty Energy moves more than a million truckloads of sand a year. Long before AI touched the frac job itself, it went to work on the truck schedule. The same sand now moves on 35% fewer trucks, and the CEO says nobody was laid off.
Ron Gusek, Liberty Energy Inc. · $4.0 billion (FY2025)
13 Garbage Routes Just Disappeared at Casella. The Fix Was an Invoicing System.
In the second week of May, Casella's acquired Mid-Atlantic haulers finally started keeping their customers, orders, routes and invoices in one place. By August, 13 routes and the trucks and labor attached to them were out of the plan. The AI is arriving now, on top of work that has already paid.
Ned Coletta, Casella Waste Systems · $1.84 billion (FY2025)
HSS Rebuilt Its Whole Operating Model. Now Nearly Half Its Orders Never Touch a Phone.
HSS rents tools and machinery to builders and contractors — decades of it, run out of depots, the branch-yards where the rental fleet lives. It sold roughly 130 of them for a single pound; the rental business had become such a money-loser that HSS paid the buyer £26 million to take them off its hands. What's left is a marketplace its own software runs, and website orders have climbed from about 5% to nearly half.
Tom Shorten, ProService Building Services Marketplace plc (formerly HSS Hire) · ~£248M / ~$310M (FY2026, continuing)
PITT OHIO Rebuilt How 2,100 Drivers Work and Saved $11 Million in Year One. Then It Pointed AI at the Inbox.
A fourth-generation, family-owned freight carrier spent twenty years treating trucking as an information business — so when AI finally arrived, there was something real for it to multiply. The $11 million came twenty minutes at a time.
Chuck Hammel III, PITT OHIO · $970M+ (FY2025)
Most CEOs Buy AI Licenses. WD-40 Bought Operating Margin.
Steve Brass spent 31 years inside WD-40 before taking the CEO seat in September 2022. He took a public position on the customer outcome the company had been failing — and the work he refused to keep imposing on his planners — before he procured a single AI tool. The licenses were the same. The order was different. The receipt is 100 basis points of gross margin expansion in Q2 fiscal 2026.
Steve Brass, WD-40 Company · $590M (FY2025)
Randy Wood Is Turning a 70-Year-Old Sprinkler Company Into a Subscription Business — Because a Broken Gearbox in July Is a Farmer Who Doesn't Call in November
A $620M irrigation equipment maker in Omaha is quietly pivoting to Tech-as-a-Service — and the reason isn't recurring revenue. It's that the AI earns its keep preventing the one service call that loses you the customer.
Randy Wood, Lindsay Corporation · $620M (FY2026 annualized)
Ariat Cut Warehouse Steps From 40,000 a Day to 7,000 — And Never Once Called It an 'AI Strategy'
Beth Cross has been running the same playbook for 36 years: pick one worker, measure their hardest day, remove it. In 2026 the tool is agentic robotics. The method is the part to steal.
Beth Cross, Ariat International · ~$1B (private, estimated)
Operator Playbooks — 3 guides
Customer Service AI Without the Klarna Problem
How to deploy AI customer service in a small-cap or mid-cap business without ending up like the company that fired 700 humans, said it on stage, and quietly hired them back.
Predictive Maintenance That Actually Works
Lindsay Corporation built it on the failure that cost them the customer. GE built it on the failure that was easiest to model. One business now has an $80M MENA subscription deal. The other one wrote down $22 billion.
Where to Put AI First
A decision framework for the operating leader at a small-cap or mid-cap company picking the one place AI should go before anywhere else — and why most operators pick the wrong one.
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