100 Days in, No Filter: What the Logistics Industry Is Really Saying Right Now
Most technology built for the freight and logistics industry has been designed by people who have studied the industry. There's a meaningful difference between that and people who have actually worked in it, made the calls at 11pm when a shipment is held at the border, or sat across from a customs broker trying to explain why their system just created a compliance problem instead of preventing one.
That difference is what brought me to Yojee. After 35 years working across customs brokerage, air and sea freight, import and export, e-commerce, and specialist verticals that demand a different level of operational precision, I've developed strong opinions about what good logistics technology looks like and, more importantly, what it costs operators when it falls short. When the opportunity came to help build and take MOSAIC to market, the questions I had to answer honestly were: Is MOSAIC the product that will assist forwarders and brokers to go to the next level and based on my options of what logistics technology should be, am I the right person?
"A hundred days in, I'm confident the answer to both is yes. But what's shaped that confidence isn't the product roadmap or the investor deck. It's the conversations."
Why I Made The Move
The logistics technology space is full of vendors promising to solve everything. Big platforms that want to own every workflow, every data point, every process. I've evaluated many of them over the years. Implemented some. Lived with the consequences of a few.
"What drew me to Yojee was the vision behind the product. MOSAIC is built to connect your operations, not consume it."
The platform sits at the centre of a connected ecosystem, linking best-of-breed software together rather than replacing everything around it. For an industry as fragmented as freight forwarding and customs brokerage, that approach matches how our world actually works. Operators don't run on one system and they never have. A platform built around that reality has a fundamentally better chance of being adopted and sustained.
The community-first orientation mattered to me too. Logistics has always run on relationships and shared knowledge. A platform that treats community as a cornerstone rather than an afterthought speaks directly to the culture of this industry.
And then there's the team. I've known Mark and Shane for a long time. The depth of conviction here is real. These are people building for the future of an industry they genuinely understand and care about. That matters more than most people admit when they're deciding where to spend the next chapter of their career.
What I Found When I Started Listening
I made a deliberate decision in the first few weeks: listen before talking. I've seen too many senior hires arrive with answers before they've understood the questions. So I got on the phone, got in the room, and started having honest conversations with customers, prospects, and people across the freight forwarding and customs brokerage community.
The theme that kept surfacing came back to trust, above features or pricing. Specifically, the erosion of it after years of being oversold, underdelivered and more importantly never being consulted.
I was on a call with SME freight forwarder with a solid regional business, and about ten minutes in he said something that stopped me. He told me their last system implementation took months longer than scoped, is costing twice what was quoted, and the team still works around it rather than with it. He wasn't bitter about it, just matter-of-fact. "That's just how it goes, we didn’t have options." he said. I've heard similar versions to that story three times in the past month alone.
When operators stop expecting technology to actually work for them, they stop pushing for better. They find workarounds, they absorb the inefficiency. Breaking that cycle requires more than a good product. It requires showing up differently from the start.
Yojee’s new product offering is MOSAIC but Yojee was founded on its TCMS platform. TCMS is a mature product used throughout the world as a downstream carrier management platform. What I learnt for the discussions with these customers was that TCMS has more capability than what most are currently using, and in several cases operators weren't aware of functionality that would directly reduce manual workload for their teams. There's real value sitting untapped in those implementations, and helping customers find it is as important to me as building the new pipeline.
"Real growth isn't just about adding logos. It's about making sure the ones you have are genuinely succeeding on the platform."
On The Ground at IFCBAA
I was at the IFCBAA conference recently, and I'll be honest, I went in wanting to listen more than present. Sharing the latest MOSAIC updates with the community was valuable, but what I came away with was more useful than anything I brought into the room.
The questions from our industry peers were sharp and cut straight to the operational detail. Besides integrations and pricing tiers, they were asking about:
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What happens under operational pressure?
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How does the system behave when you're processing volume at peak?
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What does the workflow actually look like for a freight forwarder or broker?
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How does it connect with the systems they're already running without forcing a rip-and-replace decision?
These are the questions of people who have been through difficult implementations and want to understand what they're walking into before they commit. That scrutiny is healthy. It's what MOSAIC deserves, and it's what will make the product better before it goes live. We have to treat each transition as an opportunity to improve data integrity in conjunction with making the journey easy for teams.
AI: What the Community Is Actually Saying
There's a version of the AI conversation happening at the vendor level that sounds very different from the one happening at the operator level. Vendors are talking about transformation, efficiency multipliers, and intelligent automation. Operators are asking sharper questions.
The recurring concern in the IFCBAA conference session regarding AI wasn't whether AI could improve throughput or reduce manual data entry. Most people in the room accepted that it can, in the right context. The concern was accountability. Specifically, who carries liability when an AI-assisted compliance related declaration contains an error that triggers a compliance event at the border.
There was a comment during the IFCABAA conference that a customs audit by the Australian Border Force found that 30% of customs entries had a classification error and that AI could be the answer to reducing that percentage. Obviously we would need to see the finer details of the audit but could it also be that the last 12 months has seen a much higher rate of AI intervention in the customs classification sphere? Food for thought isn’t it.
"My view, shaped by three and a half decades of watching compliance failures in this industry, is that AI governance in logistics isn't a legal formality. It's the actual product design challenge."
The tools that will earn long-term adoption here are the ones that give operators full visibility into what the AI is doing and why, that keep a qualified human in the loop for decisions carrying real regulatory exposure, and that treat explainability as a feature rather than a limitation.
Compliance is the design brief. Build with it as the foundation and you earn trust incrementally. Try to work around it and you'll find out why freight and customs professionals have long memories. Don’t get me wrong AI is super exciting and will have huge benefits but the key will be ensuring it is a trusted teammate. If your teams lose faith in it early it will be hard to get back.
Why MOSAIC Feels Different To Me
I've evaluated a lot of logistics platforms over the years. The ones that struggled with adoption shared a common trait: they were built around the system's logic rather than the operator's workflow. The assumption being that users would adapt to the software rather than the software adapting to the work.
"What struck me when I looked at MOSAIC was the design philosophy, it is built from the operator's desk outward, not from the architecture inward."
The design starts with the person doing the work. The customs entry workflow, the way consignment data flows through the platform, the way it connects with external systems without demanding that everything else gets replaced first. Built for the fragmented reality of how freight businesses actually operate, not the clean version of that reality that looks good in a demo.
The community-first pillar resonates with me. MOSAIC is designed to sit at the centre of a connected ecosystem, linking best-of-breed tools rather than replacing them. For freight forwarders and customs brokers running mixed environments, that's a fundamentally more honest starting point.
What Keeps Me Thinking
The talent question came up more than I expected in these first hundred days. Operator after operator raising the same concern: experienced people are leaving the industry and the knowledge they carry walks out with them. A senior customs broker who retires takes years of border-specific pattern recognition, supplier relationships, and hard-won judgement calls with them. That's not easily documented and certainly not easily replaced.
This is where I think the industry conversation about AI needs to go deeper. The real opportunity for AI in logistics isn't just processing speed or error reduction, as valuable as those are. It's capturing institutional knowledge and making it accessible to the next generation of practitioners coming through. Helping a newer broker navigate a complex declaration the way an experienced colleague would guide them, in real time, without needing that colleague in the room.
"The industry will attract the next generation when it can show them a career path that combines genuine expertise with modern tools, rather than one that feels threatened by them."
That's a conversation worth having loudly, and it's one I intend to be part of."
Where This Goes Next
The listening phase is transitioning into a building phase. What I've heard in these first hundred days is going directly into how we position MOSAIC, how we support TCMS customers in extracting full value from the platform, and how we show up in the conversations this community is already having.
If you're a freight forwarder or customs broker who wants an early look at MOSAIC before it goes wide, reach out directly. If you're already on TCMS and want to talk through whether you're getting everything the platform offers, the same invitation applies. The conversations I've found most valuable in these first hundred days have been with practitioners who tell me what's actually happening in their operations.
That's the kind of conversation I'm always up for.
Rob Cotter is Chief Growth Officer at Yojee Limited (ASX: YOJ). He has over 35 years of experience across customs brokerage, air and sea freight, e-commerce logistics, and senior leadership roles at organisations including Mainfreight, Agility, AGS, CT Freight and Jetpets.
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