News / The wrong question: why the TMS debate is distracting forwarders from what comes next 

As freight forwarders wrestle with rising software costs and re-evaluate long-standing technology partners, the industry conversation has become increasingly fixated on one question: which TMS? 

But according to Brian Glick, founder of integration platform Chain.io, that may be the wrong place to focus. 

“I don’t think the question is, what should my TMS be?”, he says. “Because, frankly, they all work.” 

It comes as debate around CargoWise pricing and vendor dependency is dominating industry discussion. Yet, Mr Glick argues, this focus risks missing a far more important shift already under way. 

“The question that people are getting distracted from is, what’s next?” he explains. “What does all this AI stuff mean? What’s the role of the TMS in my company?” 

Mr Glick’s perspective is shaped by his own experience running IT and sales at a customs broker, where he saw integration become “the number-one blocker to revenue”. 

“You go to a big shipper and you have to have an integration in order to do business with them,” he says. “And that takes a year… and you don’t get paid during that year.” 

That friction, he argues, has only worsened as the number of systems in play has multiplied. 

“At the beginning of my career, it was like they had one system, we had one system… now they’ve got 100, we’ve got 100, and it’s all really complicated.” 

This is where platforms like Chain.io position themselves: not as competitors to TMS providers, but as neutral infrastructure sitting between them. 

“Somebody needed to be neutral and solve this problem outside of the TMSs,” he says. “We just sit in the background and do the thing that nobody else wants to do.” 

Crucially, that layer also gives forwarders more flexibility, he explains. “It helps them control their own destiny because it lets people separate the connections from the core system.”

In other words, while integration alone won’t drive a TMS switch, it lowers the barriers to change, and makes hybrid or multi-system environments more viable. 

That matters in the context of the current CargoWise debate, but Mr Glick is cautious about overstating its immediate impact. 

“Was there a swell of people who, the first day, cancelled their CargoWise contracts and switched TMS? Absolutely not,” he says. 

Large-scale system changes remain rare for a reason. 

“If the only reason you’re going to make a huge technology change… is because of the money, you’re probably going to struggle,” he adds. “It is ripping out the brain of your company and putting in a new brain.” 

Instead, decisions around core systems tend to play out over years, even decades. 

“These are three-, five-, 10-, 20-year decisions… we’ll know the answer to this in 2030.” 

For most forwarders, then, the real question is not whether to switch, but how to evolve. 

Looking ahead, Mr Glick suggests the industry may be overestimating the long-term centrality of the TMS itself. 

“For 5,000 years, we shipped without a TMS,” he notes. “We’re all kind of from this assumption that the TMS runs the business… I don’t know that that’s what the future looks like.” 

Instead, he points to a more decentralised, AI-driven model – one in which individual shipments are managed dynamically, rather than forced through standardised workflows. 

“I think the next thing is going to look a lot less like centralised command and control,” he says, “and much more… each shipment being managed by an AI agent-type system.” 

That would mark a fundamental shift from today’s approach, where TMS platforms are built around consistency and process. 

“The idea of everything is an assembly line and every shipment is the same is what a TMS is built [on],” he explains. “In the AI world, every shipment is going to be unique and managed in a way that’s appropriate for that shipment.” 

Early signs of this shift are emerging, but only in fragments. 

“I am seeing these very kind of lurchy starts by a lot of startups to attack very little pieces of it,” he says. “We’ve yet to see anyone who has really gone after the end-to-end orchestration of the shipment.” 

The key question is whether incumbent TMS providers will evolve fast enough – or whether disruption will come from outside. 

“That’s the big arms race right now.” 

If that vision plays out, integration – back-office plumbing – becomes central to competitive advantage. 

“As shippers want more and more data… that is your interface to that company,” Mr Glick says. “If you’re not good at that, you can’t compete.” 

He points to growing demands for granular visibility, with one shipper requesting “something like 75 milestones per shipment”. 

At that level, integration is no longer just about connectivity, but about customer experience and value creation. 

“If all you do is move their boxes, your margins are next to nothing,” he says. “If you can provide the value-added services… then you’re a partner.” 

In that context, the current focus on pricing models and vendor choice may prove to be a sideshow. 

The more consequential shift is structural: from monolithic systems to interconnected ecosystems, and ultimately to more autonomous, AI-driven operations. 

Mr Glick’s own ambition reflects that trajectory – and his view of where value will sit. 

“My non-modest goal… is for Chain.io to be as boring in supply chain as Mastercard is in finance,” he says. “That it’s just, ‘we send the data… and it goes to where it needs to go’.” 

For an industry used to debating platforms, that may be an uncomfortable idea. 

But if he is right, the winners of the next decade may not be those asking which system to choose, but those asking what comes after the system altogether.