Al Root
Freight brokers have taken software companies' spot as the latest potential victim of artificial intelligence, a curious pivot because they were recently seen as winners from AI.
Both groups of companies are asset-light.
It has been a painful day for a host of shippers. Shares of C.H. Robinson Worldwide were down 23% in late trading while the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average were off about 1.2%.
Shares of fellow freight brokers Expeditors International of Washington and RXO were down 15% and 27%, respectively. Shares of less-than-truckload shippers were off 7.4% and 5.1%, respectively. The intermodal shipper J.B. Hunt Transport Services lost 8%.
There was no downgrade or earnings report to pin the declines on. Instead, there was widespread pain in the sector, seemingly spurred on by expectations that AI start-ups will try to disrupt traditional brokerage markets. A white paper from a company called Algorythm Holdings describing how AI tools can organize shipping better than traditional brokers may be behind the slide.
It is as if the market woke up today and decided that anyone who arranges freight will be disrupted by smart AI agents. While freight brokers have relationships with companies and owners of logistics assets, and their businesses go deeper than a website to connect buyers and sellers, that isn't much comfort on Thursday.
The move in the stocks comes despite most management teams singing the praises of AI. The freight industry has been an early adopter of the technology, leveraging it for scheduling and routing, among other things.
"In Global Forwarding, we expanded gross margins by [1.2 percentage points] year-over-year through improved revenue management discipline," said C.H. Robinson CEO David Bozeman on his company's Jan. 28 earnings call. "We also continue to evolve our Global Forwarding business to a more cohesive, centralized model with standardized and Lean AI-enabled processes."
C.H. Robinson stock jumped 5.1% in response to the earnings.
"We invest over $100 million annually in our best-in-class tech, all in service of achieving our future state tech vision, which will be driven by AI," said RXO CEO Drew Wilkerson on his company's Feb. 6 earnings call. "Once fully implemented, our capabilities will fundamentally change how our people get work done and provide customers with a faster, more seamless way of managing their freight."
RXO stock rose 1.9% after earnings.
Freight stocks had been fine until Thursday. Through the close on Wednesday, the State Street SPDR S&P Transportation ETF was up 14% year to date.
The State Street SPDR S&P Software & Services ETF was the one getting hammered. It has fallen 18% for the year as AI tools that make software development easier have investors wondering about the value of software companies. Now that fear has spread.
So far, stocks of companies owning significant amounts of physical assets have been less affected. Shares of the railway Union Pacific were down 0.9% in Thursday's trading, while the stock of FedEx and UPS shares were down 0.4% and 1.4%, respectively. Both those companies have fleets of planes and trucks delivering time-sensitive packages.
Providers of hardware from chips to power-generation equipment ? have also held up well, partly thanks to huge capital spending at the AI hyperscalers Amazon.com, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Alphabet. That quartet plans to spend almost $600 billion on new equipment in 2026, up 64% from 2025, according to FactSet.
Shares of data-center infrastructure providers Vertiv and Eaton were up 53% and 24% year to date, heading into Thursday trading. And shares of machine vision and automation providers Cognex and Zebra Technologies were up 35% and 11% on Thursday, respectively, after both reported earnings that included strong outlooks for 2026.
AI needs hardware to see, and data needs to be digitized for it to learn and react. Those are things that Cognex and Zebra hardware can facilitate.
That is another win for makers of physical goods.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 12, 2026 15:08 ET (20:08 GMT)
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