Manifest 2026: the state of logistics automation

Where we stood

The Glacis team spent February 9 to 11 at Manifest in Las Vegas, as a company with agents of its own to show and as visitors walking the floor to learn. On the last day we went booth to booth and asked every team the same three questions: who do you sell to, what does the software do when no one is watching, and how do you charge for it. These are the patterns we heard most often.

Agents now take action

Almost every team we spoke to showed software that acts on what it finds, and the interaction looked the same from booth to booth: the agent proposes an action, a person approves it, and the agent carries it out. Planning tools that model a disruption and its what-if scenarios now end in the same step, a decision on whether to expedite. The difference between vendors is no longer whether the software acts but where it starts and what it is allowed to touch.

Pricing follows the unit of work

We counted six pricing models in one afternoon: per phone call, per email, per task completed, per shipment, per trading partner connected, and a platform fee with usage bought as credits upfront. The ones that made the most sense to us were priced in a unit the buyer's team already counts, such as shipments or completed tasks. A price that maps to work done is easier to defend in a budget meeting than a seat count.

Enterprise automation still takes people

One vendor told us its minimum contract had gone up sharply since last year. Smaller deployments had taken more engineering time than they paid for, because every enterprise has its own systems, formats and exceptions. Automation at this scale is still delivered partly by people, and pricing is starting to say so openly.

Automation sits on top of the core

Almost nobody on the floor was asking buyers to replace a system of record. The common pattern was a layer that connects to the TMS, ERP, WMS and planning software and does the work between them. The same idea showed up in integration: connect once to a single platform that maintains the connections to every supplier and partner, instead of building each one yourself. Buyers described their core systems as fixed and wanted the work around them done.

Logistics is the proving ground

Phone calls, emails and documents between companies are where these agents learn their job first. One vendor that started in freight is now taking the same agents to banking, airlines and hospitals, while most of its business is still logistics. The volume of routine communication in a supply chain makes it the best place to prove that an agent can be trusted with real work.

Where it is going

The question in 2026 is no longer whether agents belong in supply chain operations. It is how far a team will let them act on their own, and how they will pay for the work. To us, the clearest answers came from teams who could show a live customer, a unit of work and the moment a person steps in.

Notes from the expo floor, February 11, 2026.

Read the full recap

The rest of the findings are free. Enter your work email to keep reading.

No spam. We send the PDF and occasional research.