Going to Inland26? Start here.
JOC Inland Distribution Conference: September 28 to 30, 2026, The Westin Chicago River North, Chicago. Theme: “The Big Payback.”
Five sessions I would not miss
- Inland Academy III: Why Shippers Should Care About Small Carriers · Monday, Sept. 28
- Inland Academy VI: Cargo Theft & Security: Protecting Supply Chains · Monday, Sept. 28
- North American Freight and Economic Outlook · Tuesday, Sept. 29
- Shipper Perspectives: Flexing Risk Models and Achieving Cost Goals, A Look into 2027 · Tuesday, Sept. 29
- Partnership Until the Market Turns: The Uncomfortable Truth About Shipper of Choice · Wednesday, Sept. 30
Five questions I want answered
- Does facility performance materially affect transportation procurement, carrier pricing or capacity allocation?
- Is physical driver and carrier identity becoming an enterprise-security requirement, not just an operational check-in step?
- Where should the boundary between TMS, WMS and yard execution actually live?
- What physical-world data does AI need before companies can safely automate more execution?
- Can shippers measure bad facility performance in lost carrier hours, not just detention invoices?
I am heading to Chicago for the JOC Inland Distribution Conference next week. Before a show I usually scan the agenda for people worth meeting and sessions that might teach me something. This time I read it differently: as one set of signals about where transportation and physical supply chain operations are headed.
What stood out is how often the yards show up without the word "yard" in the session title. Carrier capacity. Driver regulation. Cargo theft. Carrier identity. Shipper of Choice. Intermodal. TMS architecture. AI. Those sound like separate conversations. They increasingly are not.
The yards are where a transportation plan becomes a physical operation, where the carrier, driver, tractor, trailer, load, dock and paperwork all finally have to agree on what is actually happening.
So this is the pre-read I built for myself: fourteen sessions, what I think they mean, and the questions I want answered in Chicago.
The sessions
Fourteen sessions, read for the yards
01 · Monday, Sept. 28
Inland Academy III: Why Shippers Should Care About Small Carriers
Adam Wingfield, Founder and Managing Director, Innovative Logistics Group
On the agenda: A regulatory crackdown is tightening the pool of trusted capacity, so small fleets and owner-operators matter more. Finding and vetting them is still hard.
The obvious conversation is carrier sourcing. The less obvious one is facility interoperability.
A dedicated fleet learns the quirks of a network over hundreds of visits. A small carrier arriving for the first time cannot. If shippers need to pull capacity from a broader, more fragmented base, facilities have to get easier for a stranger to navigate on the first try.
The question to askHow much of the difficulty of using fragmented capacity is the transportation market, and how much is forcing every new driver to learn a different facility from scratch?
02 · Monday, Sept. 28
Inland Academy V: A New TMS Framework
Bart De Muynck, Founder
On the agenda: Shippers used to pick TMS software first. Now they pick on network and data. A new framework for where to invest in TMS in an AI and automation world.
Every enterprise knows roughly what its TMS owns and what its WMS owns. Things get fuzzy in between.
Who owns arrival. Who owns gate state. Who owns the appointment after reality stops matching it. Who owns trailer state. Who decides which door a truck actually gets. Who records that a yard move physically happened.
The asphalt between the TMS and the WMS increasingly needs its own live state and its own orchestration.
The question to askWhere should the TMS’s responsibility actually end?
03 · Monday, Sept. 28
Inland Academy VI: Cargo Theft & Security: Protecting Supply Chains
Keith Lewis, VP Operations, Verisk CargoNet
On the agenda: Cargo fraud and theft are changing shape as the trucking market tightens. The latest trends, emerging threats, and how to protect shipments.
Cargo theft is usually discussed as a transportation-security problem. Eventually it reaches a physical facility, where somebody arrives claiming to be the right driver, working for the right carrier, collecting the right freight.
What identity was checked, against what record. Was the tractor expected. Was the trailer expected. Was the driver authorized. Who has custody now.
Security and operations are going to get harder to separate. The gate may become a digital identity and chain-of-custody checkpoint, not just the place a driver gets instructions.
04 · Tuesday, Sept. 29
North American Freight and Economic Outlook
Paul Bingham, S&P Global Market Intelligence; Tim Denoyer, ACT Research; Lawrence Gross, Gross Transportation Consulting; moderated by William B. Cassidy, JOC
On the agenda: JOC frames the early-2026 market turn as driven by an unexpectedly sharp contraction in capacity, not a jump in demand, pushed by fuel costs and a regulatory crackdown. Spot truckload rates rose by double-digit percentages year over year, which has bolstered intermodal rail volume. The panel asks whether the economy supports growth into 2027.
That has an interesting implication for facilities. When trucks and drivers are abundant, wasting 30 minutes is an efficiency problem. When usable capacity tightens, those same 30 minutes become capacity.
A facility that cuts a carrier’s turn time is returning productive truck and driver hours to the network. That argues for a different yard ROI number.
The question to askNot just how much detention did we eliminate. How many productive carrier hours did this facility return to the network?
05 · Tuesday, Sept. 29
The Tide Has Turned: A Conversation with J.B. Hunt President and Chief Executive Officer Shelley Simpson
Shelley Simpson, J.B. Hunt; interviewed by Ari Ashe, JOC
On the agenda: JOC frames the four-year freight recession as over, with capacity leaving the market on non-domiciled CDL and English-proficiency enforcement. The conversation covers how customers should prepare for their next truckload and intermodal RFPs.
J.B. Hunt touches dedicated, truckload, brokerage, final mile and intermodal, which is a useful vantage point on the coming RFP cycle.
Shippers spend enormous effort optimizing routing guides, carrier bids and lane economics. A carrier’s economics do not stop when the truck enters the gate.
The question to askAs the market tightens, will carriers differentiate more aggressively between customers based on how productive their drivers and equipment are once they reach the facility?
06 · Tuesday, Sept. 29
View From the Top: Insights from Industry Leaders
Heather Dohrn, Dohrn Transfer; Andy Dyer, AFS Logistics; Michael Lin, Musco Family Olive Co.; Melissa Suebeck, TA Dedicated; Nick Waters, Masco Corporation; moderated by Eric Johnson, JOC
On the agenda: The market has shifted toward carriers. Service providers, buyers and technology providers discuss Q4 2026 and, more importantly, 2027.
Less interesting than everyone’s directional freight forecast is what they think changes operationally: what gets more expensive, what gets harder to source, what workflows become unacceptable, what data suddenly matters.
Market turns expose operational debt. That is what is worth listening for.
07 · Tuesday, Sept. 29
A New Era of Driver Regulation
Jesse Elison, Deputy Administrator, FMCSA; Matthew M. Leffler, Armchair Attorney LLC
On the agenda: FMCSA action on non-US drivers, English-language standards and CDL issuers, plus the Supreme Court’s Montgomery ruling, are tightening truck capacity.
A smaller, more constrained driver pool changes the economics of wasted driver time. It also raises the importance of knowing who is actually operating the truck at the gate.
Transportation compliance and gate operations have historically lived in different systems, sometimes different departments. That boundary is going to get more interesting.
08 · Tuesday, Sept. 29
Intermodal I: Intermodal Service
Darren Holiday, Barrington Nutritionals; Rick LaGore, InTek Logistics; Lorin Rotstein, Performance Intermodal, a MEDLOG Company; Mike Santa Maria, Union Pacific; moderated by Ari Ashe, JOC
On the agenda: Shippers are shifting volume to rail to hedge against truckload rate hikes. JOC calls 2026 the first major test for intermodal since the pandemic-era service meltdown five years ago.
Rail does not remove execution complexity, it changes it. Containers, chassis and trailers still have to arrive somewhere, be identified, staged, moved, loaded, unloaded and handed off.
More modal handoffs mean more physical state transitions inside the fence line.
The question to askAs networks get more multimodal, who owns the real-time physical truth of freight once it is inside the facility?
09 · Tuesday, Sept. 29
Shipper Perspectives: Flexing Risk Models and Achieving Cost Goals, A Look into 2027
John Janson, SanMar; Holly Pearce, Otis Elevator Company; Pieter Potgieter, Hubbell; Mike Regan, TranzAct
On the agenda: Four shipper operators on fuel surcharges, tariffs, cargo theft and fraud, the role of brokers, and data and automation.
That is effectively a 45-minute enterprise discovery session if you listen for the right thing.
Everybody wants better data. What data do they actually wish they had. Everybody wants automation. What process stops them from automating today. Where does the network still depend on somebody knowing which trailer is behind Row C.
10 · Wednesday, Sept. 30
Partnership Until the Market Turns: The Uncomfortable Truth About Shipper of Choice
Angi Acocella, PhD, MIT CTL; Shannon Breen, FreightVana; Kathy Faulk, Global Supply Chain Executive/Consultant; Rob Haddock, DemandChain AI; moderated by Ari Ashe, JOC
On the agenda: Shippers have been told predictable freight, accurate forecasts, faster turns and better facilities earn carrier loyalty. This session tests that against a scorecard carriers may actually keep. JOC is explicit that it will not be another conversation about detention, communication and treating drivers well.
This might be the sleeper session of the conference for anyone who owns a distribution network, precisely because it is arguing past the detention framing most of this space defaults to.
Does facility performance affect transportation procurement, not theoretically, actually. Does a carrier price a consistently fast facility differently. Does it allocate scarce capacity differently. If that connection can be measured, yard modernization moves out of the narrow warehouse-efficiency bucket and into transportation strategy.
The question to askDoes facility performance materially change carrier pricing or capacity allocation, and can a shipper measure it?
11 · Wednesday, Sept. 30
A Conversation with Werner CIO Daragh Mahon
Daragh P. Mahon, EVP and CIO, Werner; interviewed by Eric Johnson, JOC
On the agenda: Build versus buy versus invest, where Mahon sees AI creating measurable value, and his somewhat controversial view that software itself will get less important over time.
If traditional interfaces disappear behind agents, the UI matters less. The underlying system’s ability to expose clean state and executable events matters more, especially where software touches physical operations.
An agent can decide Trailer 53291 belongs at Door 7. Before anything useful happens, the system still has to know: is 53291 actually there, is Door 7 actually open, did the prior move actually happen, who is authorized to execute the next one.
12 · Wednesday, Sept. 30
Identity Crisis: How Carrier Vetting and Regulation is Transforming Truckload
Garrett Allen, SearchCarriers.com; Danielle Chaffin, Revenova; Ryan Joyce, GenLogs; Jeffrey Tucker, CTB, Tucker Company Worldwide
On the agenda: Vetting tools and enforcement are reshaping how drivers get vetted, with tools built for drivers as well as for brokers and shippers.
Most vetting happens before the truck arrives. The gate is where all of that digital diligence gets tested against reality: a carrier was approved, fine, but is the person standing at the gate actually operating on their behalf.
That gap between digital authorization and physical arrival is where I expect security teams to spend a lot more time.
13 · Wednesday, Sept. 30
Human out of the Loop?
Jake Hoffman, Gnosis Freight; Nilkanth Patel, Pallet; Daniel Powell, Optimal Dynamics; moderated by Eric Johnson, JOC
On the agenda: Will AI take over non-physical freight work, hands off the wheel, or does the industry settle into a human-in-the-loop model.
The AI debate in freight tends to focus on whether it replaces planners, brokers or admin work. There is another question: what happens when an AI decision touches the physical world.
Either outcome the panel lands on raises the importance of ground truth. An autonomous decision built on stale physical state is just a faster way to be wrong.
14 · Wednesday, Sept. 30
Agents of Change: Mapping Out the Agentic Age in Truckload Brokerage
Jesse Buckingham, Vooma; Robert Nathan, Envoy; Glen Stewart, HappyRobot; moderated by Eric Johnson, JOC
On the agenda: What agentic AI means for freight, including ROI, the cost of digital versus human workers, and change management.
Agentic brokerage is not a yard topic, but it is a leading indicator. Transportation software is moving from telling humans what happened toward executing work directly. Physical logistics will follow the same arc.
Our view: establish ground truth, standardize the operation, orchestrate it, then automate it. Asking sophisticated automation to run on top of an inconsistent physical process usually just means asking it to reverse the order.
By Wednesday afternoon
Five questions I want Inland26 to answer
- Does facility performance materially affect transportation procurement, carrier pricing or capacity allocation?
- Is physical driver and carrier identity becoming an enterprise-security requirement, not just an operational check-in step?
- Where should the boundary between TMS, WMS and yard execution actually live?
- What physical-world data does AI need before companies can safely automate more execution?
- Can shippers measure bad facility performance in lost carrier hours, not just detention invoices?
One last note before Chicago
YardFlow got a useful data point on several of these questions this month. FreightWaves reported that a beverage giant is expanding YardFlow to all 200-plus of its facilities after a 26-site deployment where the shipper moved nearly 5% more freight with the same headcount, according to a YardFlow analysis. YardFlow has processed close to 2 million shipments across the 26 sites so far.
That result is part of why I am interested in the conversations at Inland. There is plenty of technology in logistics. The harder question is which technology actually creates more productive physical capacity across a network, and that is what I am trying to learn in Chicago.
If this hits a nerve, find me in Chicago.
Further reading: The Yard Problem Map, yard modernization, what a yard management system is, and the measured record.
Sources
- JOC Inland Distribution Conference, official site
- Inland26 full agenda
- FreightWaves: YardFlow lands over 200-site yard automation deal (Sept. 19, 2026)
Session titles, days, speakers and descriptions come from the official agenda as of September 23, 2026. Agendas change; the linked session page is the authority. Everything under a session summary is my read, not JOC's.
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