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

Imagine a single railroad company that could move freight seamlessly from the ports of Los Angeles to the ports of New York without handoffs, interchange delays, or needing to switch carriers mid-journey.

That's the promise behind the proposed merger between the Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern railroads. If the deal is approved, it will create the first single-line transcontinental railroad in U.S. history, spanning more than 50,000 miles across 43 states and nearly 100 ports.

Supporters say this could make rail a more serious competitor to long-haul trucking, lowering costs and improving supply chain efficiency. Critics say it risks concentrating too much power in too few hands in an industry where four railroads already control more than 90% of U.S. freight.

Earlier this month, regulators hit the reset button. The Surface Transportation Board (STB) rejected the merger application - not on its merits, but because the paperwork was incomplete.

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

• What Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern are proposing, and why it would be historically significant
• The arguments for the merger, including efficiency, cost, and competition with trucking
• The arguments against it, from labor, shippers, competitors, and policy advocates
• Where the Surface Transportation Board fits in, and what the January 2026 rejection means from an approval and timeline standpoint

Links:

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

In late 2023, one of the world's most critical maritime chokepoints effectively broke.

After Hamas' October 7th attack on Israel, Houthi militants began targeting commercial shipping in the Red Sea. Initially, their target was Israel-linked vessels, then they increasingly started targeting anything that passed through.

What followed was a near-collapse of confidence in the Suez Canal, a route that normally handles roughly 10–12% of global seaborne trade. Ocean carriers rerouted thousands of ships around the Cape of Good Hope, adding weeks, cost, fuel burn, and complexity to global supply chains.

Fast forward to late 2025 and early 2026, and something quietly significant happened: Maersk, the world's second-largest container carrier, sent ships back through the Red Sea. It wasn't a full return or a declaration of victory, but it was a meaningful test.

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

• Why Maersk's Red Sea test voyages matter more than they may appear
• The economic and capacity pressures pushing carriers back toward Suez
• Why a "safe reopening" may still create winners and losers
• What procurement and supply chain leaders should be watching for next

Links:

• High Stakes in the Red Sea
• Kelly Barner on LinkedIn
• Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter
• Art of Supply on AOP
• Subscribe to This Week in Procurement

In early December of last year, two thefts took place in Taunton, Massachusetts, that involved two usually wonderful things: lobster and logistics.

The stolen property was valued at $400,000: approximately $250,000 worth of lobster and $150,000 in crabmeat. Both thefts took place at the same warehouse. The crimes were a massive hit to all of the businesses involved at one of the most critical times of the year.

Unfortunately, this kind of fraud-based theft is all too common. Even more unfortunately, the opportunity to steal this property was created by security lapses in the supply chain. Significant effort went into tricking the warehouse to hand over the seafood, but it worked.

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

• The theft: who, what, where, and when
• How common this form of theft is, and the multi-agency law enforcement effort that is being mounted in response
• All of the forms of cost associated with 'fictitious pickups'

Links:

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

"When the Wright brothers got their airplane up in the air for the first time, it wasn't because they overcame the laws of physics, it was because they figured out how to harness those laws." - Patrick Kilbride, Policy Fellow at the Center for American Principles

The rate and scale of change taking place around us are so destabilizing that it would be easy to think that 'old ideas' no longer apply. Could economic principles that were articulated in the late 1700s possibly be relevant in a global, digital economy?

Patrick Kilbride, Policy Fellow at the Center for American Principles, and principal at Kilbride Public Affairs, says yes – and he recently re-read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations to prove it to himself.

Patrick is a public policy expert with experience as a Deputy Assistant U.S. Trade Representative. He has held a number of executive strategy- and policy-focused roles at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Today, he is a Policy Fellow at the Center for American Principles, a 501(c)(4) focused on personal liberties, free markets, and strong national security.

In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Kelly Barner speaks with Patrick about the wisdom Adam Smith and his contemporaries can still offer us today:

• Why (and which) economic principles articulated during the Enlightenment still hold true today
• The quality of life improvements that have been driven by productivity gains despite population growth
• The role that governments can play in supporting enlightened self-interest
  

Links:

• Patrick Kilbride on LinkedIn
• The Center for American Principles
• Kelly Barner on LinkedIn
• Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter
• Art of Supply on AOP
• Subscribe to This Week in Procurement

'Tis the season… for making supply chain predictions. Given how volatile 2025 was, anyone willing to share their opinions about the coming year deserves an award for courage.

In this episode of Art of Supply, the last of 2025, Kelly Barner shares her curated list of picks for the most compelling 2026 supply chain predictions, not ranked in any particular order, and with no guarantees for how likely they are to come true.

These predictions suggest that:

• Localization, automation, and resilience will keep colliding with reality, not hype
• Decision-making will stay fast, data will stay late, and companies will learn to live with the gap
• Rising costs and tighter oversight (from freight to cyber risk to returns) will force uncomfortable tradeoffs
• Government influence on supply chains isn't fading, it's expanding in new and unexpected ways

Links:

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