Editor’s note: This interview took place in December.
Logistics Management Group News Editor Jeff Berman recently spoke with Doug Waggoner, CEO of Chicago-based Echo Global Logistics about various topics, including: the state of the freight economy, tariffs and trucking capacity, and AI, among others. Their conversation follows below.
Logistics Management (LM): How do you view the current state of the freight economy?
Doug Waggoner: If you would have asked me that question two weeks ago, I would have just said it’s the same old story. I mean, everything is just flat year-over-year, for things like pricing and volume. For Echo, our volume is up. We’re showing some growth. It is hard to say that that’s a macroeconomic thing. It can just be us taking market share with a few accounts. I don’t really translate that into a macro trend. But we’re happy that we’re having growth. But when I look at all the other statistics, they’re just ho-hum. It’s like the numbers are the same as they were a year ago. But then in the last two weeks, that changed. We’ve seen the market tighten up, and we’ve seen prices shoot up. We saw rates go up 14 cents a mile in one day, you know. We believe it’s a factor of the holiday, the shorter week, where people are trying to stuff five days, afraid into three days—that could be a factor. Weather, certainly a factor if trucks can’t get to where they need to be. And, so, the balance of the networks gets out of whack. I guess the thing that we’re struggling with is, OK, the last two weeks look interesting. It looks like it could be the start of something big. But, you know, with all those things that I just said, maybe it’s just a little temporary blip. The one thing that I think we have learned in the last couple of weeks is it’s not going to take much to make the market tight again, because for those inputs are that I just rattled off, whichever of those correlates to what we’re feeling in the market right now haven’t been that great for that long. So, when manufacturing comes back, if supply continues to come out of the system or any sort of exogenous catalyst, I think, could tip us back into better market conditions, at least for a broker. In 2023 we said in 2024 the market’s going to flip. And then in 2024 we said the market’s going to flip in 2025. I kind of hate to keep saying that, but it feels like 2026 is going to be a good year, and everybody I talked to seems to think the same thing.
LM: How would you sort of view, or describe, the year from a trade and tariff perspective, in terms of the impact on the market?
Waggoner: I think it’s hard to say. I think, on one hand, there were so many starts and stops, and that’s Trump’s style, threaten with a big hammer, and then at the last minute, back off. There was certainly some disruption, but the disruption varies by country and commodity. It’s not across the board, and it doesn’t affect everybody the same. And, therefore, it’s really hard to understand what the impact is, unless you really go in and study it on a customer-by- customer basis and call them up and ask them if they’re being impacted by tariffs. That tends to be more anecdotal, and it’s just hard to extrapolate that into a condition.
LM: Do you think there is a possibility that 2026 could be less chaotic on the trade front?
Waggoner: I do think that there is a lot of investment coming out of the White House’s trade negotiations, but it takes a while. If a company commits to investing in a plant in the United States that’s currently manufacturing somewhere else, we may not feel the benefit of that for three years. But I do think there’s some good things coming [that have a trade impact]. Interest rates going down is certainly one of them. And when we talk about lackluster manufacturing, to the extent that rates keep coming down, that’s interesting. Housing is a factor, and interest rates certainly affect housing. And as housing heats back up again, it does two things: it generates economic activity, and in the trucking industry, it attracts truck drivers. Every new house represents multiple truckloads, and it is also significant because it pulls labor out of the driver pool.
LM: How would you sort of define or summarize the 2025 peak season activity? From your perspective,
Waggoner: I think we saw a little bit of a peak season, but weather was a factor. In the Midwest, it got cold early in November, and much colder than what we usually see, and in multiple parts of the country, there were weather disruptions, so it is sort of difficult to ascertain what impacts were from weather and what were from peak season. The fact that our volume is up could be indicative that it was maybe a little bit better than what we anticipated.
LM: How do you view the truckload spot market? There was a lot going on to end 2025, including the capacity outlook, volumes, rates, the non-domiciled CDL situation and also the crackdown on CDL “mills.”
Waggoner: On that front, I think 2026 could be a better year for multiple reasons, especially interest rates coming down, which stimulates a lot of different things like manufacturing, housing, consumer behavior and consumer spending. Those are things that are all on the demand side of freight. But there are also factors impacting supply, which have led to trucking companies going out of business left and right. Insurance costs have skyrocketed When a lot of these small, one- and two- and three-, four-, five-truck carriers go to renew their insurance, that’s when they pull the plug, because it’s not worth it. The cost of tractors is going up. When construction picks up, drivers are going to migrate to construction work. So, I think there could be a lot of pressure on the supply side in 2026 and based on what I am seeing, the sensitivity of the supply and demand dynamic is such that it doesn’t take much to disrupt the market. Another way I would describe it is that supply and demand, have been, for the last year, at sort of at an equilibrium point. Anything that pushes demand up, or anything that pushes supply down immediately slams us into a tight market and then then you can see prices will shoot up and there’s going to be more spot freight. We saw a demonstration of that over the last two weeks. I just don’t know if it’s going to last.
LM: How are things going to Echo in Mexico?
Waggoner: Our Mexico business is doing fantastic. We have made a lot of important investments and have added a lot of people. We are starting to penetrate the market. The cross-border freight is controlled on both sides of the border so you have to talk to customers in the U.S. and in Mexico. And the intra-Mexico business, which we could never do before and is mostly controlled in Mexico, is a huge opportunity. Although it is a small base, our growth rate there is astronomical so we are really excited about that.
LM: While 2025 was clearly filled with uncertainty, how are your customers viewing the market environment for 2026? What are they telling you?
Waggoner: The number one thing I hear from customers is that they understand we have been in a three-plus year freight recession, and they also expect that the market will flip. They know that means higher prices and have to work on budgets with management and they are just as curious to hear our point of view, because they are trying to manage their budgets and their own internal expectations on what freight rates are going to do. And I think everybody is kind of convinced that they are going to head up.
LM: What stage of the freight recession do you think the market is in?
Waggoner: I think that we’re at least at the late stages and maybe starting to come up. But traditionally, January and February are the slowest months of the year. The holiday [rush] starts to die in the second half of December, and it stays dead through January, and February and then starts to pick up again mid-March. So, when you look at it on a quarterly basis, you really don’t know how Q1 is going to turn out until you’re almost to the end of the quarter in mid-March. I’m pretty bullish that 2026 is going to be better. And like I said earlier, I think there are a lot of potential catalysts that could tighten the market and raise rates. And that’s probably not good for shippers, but it’s good for the transportation industry.
LM: To that end, what are some of the growth catalysts or signs of optimism you are focused on?
Waggoner: Interest rates coming down and also domestic investment in manufacturing. I think manufacturing picking up, our own cross border business, the crack down on non- domiciled drivers and non-English speaking drivers has the potential to tighten capacity. So, there are a lot of potential inputs, and any combination of those could have an immediate effect on the market. The capacity part is what drives everything. It is what sets the price in the marketplaces—and then that price starts to drive a lot of different participants’ behavior, whether you are a shipper, an asset-based trucker, or a broker you know that where we are in that freight cycle and what prices are doing and how they are trending affects all our behavior.
LM: Looking at technology, how do you view the path autonomous trucking is on?
Waggoner: Well, autonomous trucks are here. They work. They’re being used. They’re being piloted. They definitely are being used in sort of closed-circuit environments like a port. There are stretches of highway where states have approved experiments. Airplanes have been flying themselves for50 years. So, I think a truck driving itself is not all that exciting. However, I think the reality of it becoming something that you see on the highway when you’re, I think it’s minimum of five or 10 years away, sure? I think until you see autonomous cars that are ubiquitous all around you, you’re not going to see trucks until five years after that. An an 80,000-pound truck driving itself is not something that the public’s going to accept until they’re comfortable with autonomous cars driving. It’s not about the technology. It’s about the acceptance. It’s about state regulations. It’s about the first time that one hits a school bus. What’s going to happen after that? I personally believe it’s a bit away.
LM: What about Echo’s AI usage and implementation?
Waggoner: We’ve made a big investment in AI. We’re actively implementing use cases right now, as we speak. We’re automating a lot of tasks. I think we’re a leader in the industry. I think there’s a lot of people that are trying to figure it out. There’s a lot of vendors and suppliers that are emerging almost every month that help companies. So, I think eventually it’s something that everybody will do, but I think there’s early adopters that will get the benefits first, and I would put Echo in that category.
