The traditional ways of managing freight are changing rapidly in the age of AI. Trimble CEO Rob Painter equated that shift to manufacturing’s transition from the steam engine to the electric motor.
“Today, AI is our electric motor, and the trap that every company faces today is the same: bolting a new power source onto an old operational architecture, using AI to speed up the same tasks and the same legacy processes and wondering why the gains are marginal,” Painter said Monday at the annual Trimble Insight conference, held this year in San Diego. “We believe that real productivity requires the grit to redesign how work actually happens.”
Trimble is in the process of transitioning its TMS platforms to cloud-native to eliminate the limitations hosted systems place on AI. But recognizing customers’ wariness, Trimble’s modernization strategy is to give customers AI where they are right now, said Michael Kornhauser, vice president of Trimble’s Transportation & Logistics sector.
Trimble announced at the conference Monday its rollout of browser-based, AI agent-ready modernizations directly to its core carrier TMS platforms: TMW.Suite, TruckMate, Innovative and Fuel Dispatch. Its browser-accessible interfaces enable cloud-native AI tools to interact with the system while maintaining a cloud-hosted architecture that preserves the user’s operational logic.
“For years, modernization usually meant disruption because, with any transition, there's always change to manage, data to move, integrations to replace, teams to prepare,” Kornhauser told the audience during his keynote.
Kornhauser said this allows customers to modernize within their existing systems with a path to eventually move to a multi-tenant hosted cloud-based system. He added that Trimble felt this was the quickest way to help customers impact their businesses with AI, noting the pertinence of the technology’s infinite execution power in keeping pace with competition as well as the unstable economy.
“We want to give them the opportunity to focus on growing their business at this point, as opposed to worrying about technology conversions and so on,” he later shared with media during a press conference. “When we look at our modernization strategy — giving customers AI where they are right now — we feel that gives them the best option to take advantage of AI today and then worry about the underlying systems and the conversions and moving to SaaS and all that kind of stuff … We can put those off and have those discussions later when things aren't as volatile.”
This approach allows customers to keep what makes each product powerful — the decades of hard-earned intelligence built on their carrier-specific knowledge — while transforming how they are experienced.
The user interfaces of these platforms have changed, but Kornhauser noted that Trimble’s modernization work isn't just at the surface.
The company also built a comprehensive set of APIs to make each TMS easier to integrate with and to provide more ways for customers to unlock the data in their systems. An MCP (model context protocol) layer was also developed to create a secure, standardized way for agents to access the right tools and information within the TMS platforms.
“Though each of our TMS products are at a different point in this journey, they're all moving towards the same destination: more open, more connected, more intelligent and, best of all, just an update away,” Kornhauser said.
One agent, infinite execution
In a shift from last year’s Insight conference when Trimble introduced multiple agents with individual purposes, just last month the company launched Trimble Arc Agent: a single agent with multiple skills. And Arc operates across Trimble’s entire ecosystem, including the TMS platforms.
Kornhauser said the Trimble team has been the agent’s strongest user so far in the short time it has been in operation. He said many different agents with different use cases had been created internally, and the team began to realize the blurred lines between them; they overlapped. That’s how Arc was born.
Philipp Pfister, sector vice president of Transporeon at Trimble, said Arc, which automates repetitive, multi-step operational tasks through one conversational interface, is like a new employee. It automates common transportation workflows like order entry or contract intake, but it also gives users the ability to design skills tailored to their own operations.
“This industry is not one size fits all,” Pfister said. “Everyone has slightly different problems and slightly different approaches to this, and Arc Agent will be able to help here in exactly addressing this by allowing our users to bring it down to their customer instance.”
Arc comes with built-in skills built by Trimble, but customers can create their own in minutes with no code by describing in natural language the work that needs to be done and introducing the systems and information involved. The agent learns a customer’s business over time as it is fed but strictly within the permissions and rules provided. Every exception is handed back to a person, and every workflow has an audit trail.
“Every transportation company has unique processes, unique customers, unique systems and unique knowledge built over years of experience,” Kornhauser said. “Arc gives you a way to turn that knowledge into a reusable skill, totally custom and specific to your business needs.”
Additional innovations
Arc and the TMS updates were among a suite of nearly 20 new features and enhancements. These are the other solutions Trimble introduced at the conference:
Mapping and navigation — CoPilot Driver Assistant is a voice-activated AI tool that provides hands-free, natural-language in-cab navigation to locate fuel and parking and manage HOS limits. Trimble Route Orchestration for PC*Miler unifies planning, execution, visibility and settlement into a single workflow. It balances safety, tolls and delivery constraints to optimize outcomes across the entire route lifecycle. For private fleets, Appian Fleet Assistant with autonomous planning acts as a virtual dispatcher, capturing operational rules to generate multi-stop route plans in seconds.
Fleet maintenance — TMT Fleet Maintenance AI Invoice Scanning received major upgrades. Using advanced vision models, it can now batch-process up to 100 vendor PDF invoices at once, saving more than 136,000 minutes across 19,500 invoices using AI as compared to manual data entry. Automating data entry and mapping repairs to VMRS codes enables shop teams to eliminate repetitive paperwork and return assets to the road faster.
Trimble Dock & Yard — Trimble enhanced this offering with Advanced Trailer Orchestration to eliminate "black box" blind spots between the road and the facility. The solution connects appointment planning, live arrival visibility and carrier collaboration into a single shared record for every trailer from gate to dock. Teams can reduce detention costs and act before disruptions cause delay with features like Time Slot Management and the Carrier Yard Visit Portal, which automatically sync shifting ETAs.
