Yes, we're ready.
All right. Well, good morning. Once again, it's Jordan Alliger, and I'm pleased to be able to kick off the logistics portion of the transports with RXO. To speak to us about RXO and logistics markets and the ongoing transformation post-Coyote, we're very pleased to have Jared Weisfeld, Chief Strategy Officer, and Kevin Sterling, Senior Market Strategist, to discuss the story. And, I, I don't know if happy to go right into Q&A, if you had a few remarks, whatever makes the most sense.
Only remarks are, "Thanks for having us.
All right.
Happy to get right into it.
Well, you know, before we get into some of the, you know, nitty-gritty of the truck broker fundamentals, you maybe set the stage for us a little bit. You know, you did your transformative deal with Coyote, a couple years ago or a year or so ago, and obviously, things have been tough in the markets. But as we get past the downturn, can you maybe talk to the big picture setup for RXO over the next several years, you know, whether it be in the context of long-term potential, margins, however you wanna put it in a context, you know, once we get to that inflection point? How do you think about the business?
Sure. Maybe it helps to sort of frame how we thought about Coyote a year ago when we closed in September of 2024. So now RXO is the third largest provider of brokered transportation in North America. And when we acquired Coyote, the thought process was increased scale, the ability to go ahead and benefit from that increased scale in terms of reducing our cost to serve, ability to execute on buying purchase, on buying transportation more effectively. It was very limited customer overlap, very limited carrier overlap, the ability to go ahead and diversify in terms of mix towards food and beverage and transportation, as well as increase some of our SMB exposure.
Truly becoming the third largest provider of brokered managed transport, brokered transportation, and executing at that scale, the ability to invest throughout cycle and stay close to your customers, invest in technology, that really transformed the company. To your point, Jordan, what does that mean longer term, especially in the context, which I'm sure we'll get into, of a lot of the changes that have been happening over the last six-to-nine months on the regulatory side with respect to supply, the ability to go ahead and make sure that shippers have the trust to work with large brokerages, really gives us that confidence. I think it's gonna speak to higher earnings power over the long term and ability to execute against this massive opportunity, right? It's a $400 billion for-hire truckload market, and brokerages are only about 20% penetrated.
Even within that brokerage space, it's still highly fragmented. The top nine brokers post-Coyote acquisition represent about half the market. We think longer term, it's gonna be a winners take most type market structure with the larger players continuing to go ahead and gain more share because of the advantages from scale.
Jordan, what I would add too is you think about kinda RXO. What we've done is now we've pretty much fully integrated Coyote. You know, before you build a house, you gotta build a foundation. That's what we've done. We've built this solid foundation. And, you know, at some point, this market will turn. I think we're getting much closer to that every day. And when it does, we're ready. You know, we're gonna go as one unified company. And we probably did this integration very fast, you know, about a year. Normally, it can take a lot longer, but we went very fast. And, you know, that the downturn allowed us to maybe to go a little bit faster than normal. But we're ready. We're ready to approach it as one RXO.
Think, like I said, think of it as like the foundation is built. We're ready.
You know, you mentioned some of the, you know, the penetration numbers and maybe the advantage of scale. I mean, are you actually seeing small to mid-sized truck brokers shake out right now? And is that something that'll keep happening if it is?
Absolutely. I think the data is very conclusive that over the last three years, you've seen effectively most of the capacity that entered in the brokerage space during COVID has left the market. So over the last two and a half, three years, the brokerage industry has shed about 10% capacity in terms of brokerages that no longer exist. And if you think about it, right now, we've been in a softer demand environment. So what do shippers wanna do? They wanna consolidate the amount of carriers and brokers that they're leveraging. And then also, in the context of the current environment, it's very difficult in terms of unit economics for a lot of the asset-based carriers. So you've seen failures on the asset-based carrier side as well. So if you're a small to medium broker, you're getting squeezed on both sides.
Your shippers are consolidating the freight among larger brokers like an RXO. And your carriers, unlike RXO, where we've got access to 120,000 carriers, high-quality carriers and 1.6 million power units as a combined entity with Coyote, some of these smaller brokers have, you know, half a dozen carriers. So you're getting squeezed on both sides. And it's just becoming an increasingly difficult environment, I'd say, cyclically and structurally for small to medium-sized brokers. And Jordan, you know, too, some of these smaller brokers may have gotten a little bit too far in front of their skis, and their balance sheets right now are pretty heavy, pretty levered.
Yeah. Okay. Well, I imagine too, technologically, it's difficult for them to keep up as well.
For sure. I mean, that's one of the, you know, I spoke earlier about the benefits to scale associated with the acquisition of Coyote, the ability to invest throughout cycle. We spend more than $100 million a year in technology. That's across CapEx and OpEx. So you think about the. I'm sure we'll get into this.
Yeah.
So when you think about the ability to invest in AI, the ability to go ahead and really transform the business and improve margins longer term, that's something that a small to medium broker just doesn't have the ability to.
Maybe pivot a little bit. You know, obviously, you know, freight transportation, people wanna get an assessment of demand. And I know it's been generally sub-seasonal for most. Can you maybe give your updated assessment, if any, on demand and, and, you know, maybe what you're looking to feel confident that perhaps we could get to that we're approaching an inflection point?
Yeah. So I don't, you know, the one thing I don't know is I don't have the crystal ball, so I don't know when that inflection point is gonna be in terms of, in terms of demand. So let's sort of talk about the current state of the freight market. We reported just a few weeks ago.
Yeah.
The way we characterize it is, you know, we are still in a prolonged soft freight environment. If you look to the month of October, which was the most recent Cass data that's out, Cass freight shipments were down 7% year-over-year. Year-to-date, Cass shipments in 2025 haven't been this low since going back to almost the Great Financial Crisis, despite the macroeconomy doing pretty well when you think about what's going on from a services-related economy, data-center-related economy, very different from what's happening in the goods-related economy. We talk about a demand environment that has been soft. We talked about our expectations for a muted peak season. I think the key indicators that I know you look at and that I think everyone should pay attention to from a freight economy standpoint really are tender rejections, loads-to-truck ratio, and linehaul spot rates.
So what's interesting is that we are in a, I'd say, pretty unprecedented time in terms of what's been happening over the last few months because you've had demand that's been weak, but all of those freight KPIs have been going up and to the right. Tender rejections sitting at 7% despite weaker demand. We've talked about our brokerage business getting squeezed, pretty hard in the month of October. Despite that weaker demand, historically, it's a pretty variable cost line in terms of purchased transportation. When there's weaker demand, our purchased transportation cost goes lower. October was the exact opposite because so much supply had come out, in part due to a lot of the regulations surrounding non-domiciled CDLs, that we actually saw purchased transportation costs go up despite the weaker demand. So it's, you know, unprecedented times.
If you look at, you know, over the last, you know, four weeks or so, what you've seen is a continuation of spot rate increases. I think we're now. We've eclipsed in terms of industry-wide spot rates are now, as of this morning, I think at the highest level since July. So you're seeing that move higher. We've had these episodic squeezes, right, for the last three and a half years, and this now has been persisting since September. So I think to your point, Jordan, the question now becomes, you know, how much capacity is gonna continue to come out, and when do you get that demand inflection to truly start to see tender rejections getting back to the double-digit % range, which is where we typically see spot volumes.
Got it.
And Jordan, you know this. It's a question of not if, when. You know, and it's always hard to know when. But if you've seen this, there's been a cycle ever since deregulation in 1980. So it's a matter of when, not if.
I mean, do you have any read from customers in terms of next year at this point, or is it too early, or?
I think it's too early. We're not gonna, you know, speculate in terms of 2026. But I do think that, what's interesting about our setup into next year and beyond is, and this goes back to your question on Coyote, think about 12 months ago. We were just completed the acquisition of Coyote. But underneath the hood, we were still obviously very early on with respect to the integration. So we're still two companies getting integrated. Fast forward to now, the integration is materially done. We are one sales force. We are one ops, in terms of operations. We're one back office. The technology integration on the carrier side has been done since May. On the shipper side, it is now materially done. We're on one CRM. We're on one ERP. So we're on one pricing tool.
The combined data set across Coyote and RXO is now combined, so you think about us entering into bid season this year relative to 12 months ago, irrespective of the market environment, I think we are in a better position in terms of our ability to outperform from a volume standpoint. If you go back over the last decade, RXO has historically outperformed the market on the truckload side. In 2025, we took a step back in terms of truckload volume for a variety of reasons, but when you look into 2026, I think we are positioned as one RXO with the integration behind us, combined with the fact that automotive for us on a year-on-year basis stops being a big headwind in Q1, and our truckload comps ease materially starting in Q2.
I was gonna ask about this later, but you've brought it up a couple of times, the integration, and it's largely done. And the pace was actually, you did a lot in a year. So I guess the question is, net-net, did it wind up coming in ahead of schedule? You said materially done. So I assume there's little left to do in terms of or what's left to do. I mean, what, where are the gaps left, I guess?
So from an operational standpoint, this has been the largest integration of an asset-light brokerage to ever occur in the space. We had an aggressive timeline about, and we hit it. So within 12 months, we are materially done. To your point, you know, a couple of things here and there, in terms of some, a few shippers left to go in terms of the cutover. But we are, you know, vast majority, vast, vast majority done, which is great. And in terms of the ability to go ahead and, think about, you know, opportunities into bid season and the ability to go ahead and continue to roll out new products and technology, etc., so the ability to just move faster with the integration done, is clearly there. But I think it's also important to separate out the operational execution and the financial results because operationally, I would agree.
We've done a ton. We moved incredibly fast, and we hit our timelines, and we did a really, really, excellent job. But the financial results are certainly not where we had expected them to be 12 months ago, nor where they need to be in terms of making sure that we're going ahead and earning higher highs and higher lows over time. And if you think about and you go back to the time of the acquisition, we talked about at the time, we thought we were near or at the bottom of the freight cycle.
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, we were certainly off by a little bit. The market took a step lower, a big step lower in 2025. And some of the pricing actions that we talked about on the call on, what we did on the contract rates certainly, hurt us from a volume standpoint into 2025. Had we had known the market was gonna be as soft as it was, we perhaps did not need to be, as aggressive as we were on some of the price increases. So you put all that together, I think it's just important to put in context that, you know, operationally, really, I think, excellent job across the board. Financially, the results are not where they need to be. But that's the opportunity because the Coyote footprint across all of these large tier-one enterprise shippers is massive.
Even though the volumes are down year-over-year, we are active with virtually all of those customers, I think 99 out of the top 100. So, you think about the ability to go ahead and stabilize that volume, which we've done. Q3 truckload volume was up sequentially from Q2. Q4, at the midpoint of our outlook, is up again. Taking that volume that we've stabilized and then outperforming from there, getting back onto that cadence, which RXO has been doing for the last decade of growing, in excess of the market, we feel really good about. And Jordan, when you do an integration of this size too, in particular, you know, one of the first things we focused on was the carrier cutover.
We did that May 1st because when you do that, you wanna make sure, to Jared's point, you know, we didn't have the customer attrition, but you wanna make sure you service your customers well. Don't never wanna have any hiccups 'cause that's the easiest way to lose business is if you have any hiccups and, you know, truck doesn't show up. And so knock on wood, we were there and did not have any service failures.
It's a good point too, just to continue on the theme. Feels like technology cutovers is sometimes the biggest hiccup when you do a big transport acquisition. But, and you had two completely different platforms, you know, the Coyote platform and the RXO platform, and you made your decision, which one to go with. I mean, how is that? How did that process wind up moving?
A lot of the work was done ahead of time in terms of the planning, right, where we announced the acquisition in June of last year. It's hard to believe it's been a year and a half, and we got to work immediately in terms of planning and really diligencing and going in, oh, eyes wide open, what is the best platform of record to use? Is it, like, is it RXO's platform in terms of, Freight Optimizer, which is our proprietary TMS and RXO Connect, or is it Bazooka, which is the legacy Coyote platform, and the team roadmapped everything, did the stop-gap analyses, and it was clear choice that we were gonna move over to RXO Connect, month-to-month planning, did it in multiple phases, right? This was not just pushing a button and then crossing your fingers and hoping everything this was gonna work.
It was going ahead and methodically planning out in multiple phases as we think about the carrier side, as we think about the customer side, as we think about ERP and CRM and back office, and it's been an incredible job from an execution standpoint, being able to go ahead and decommission Bazooka, merge onto RXO Connect, and do it, to Kevin's point, without any service failures.
The feedback from the prior Coyote customers who've migrated over to your new system?
Feedback's been positive, right? I think the bigger lift was internally. We had a lot of employees that were using the Bazooka system for, in many cases, 10 to 15 years, right?
Yeah.
So, it's not unlike you or a lot of the investors in this room who were, you know, been using Bloomberg for the last, you know, 10 years. If you were to rip that out and go to a different system, it'll take some time, right? So and I think that actually speaks into the purchased transportation opportunity that we have. When Kevin talked about that carrier cutover that we had on May 1st earlier this year, you have carriers now, carrier reps internally at RXO that are operating on one system. They're all operating on RXO Connect. They're all covering loads within one system.
That's gonna take some time in terms of a legacy Coyote rep who is using Bazooka for a long period of time, needs to learn the new system, needs to learn the new workflow, need to go ahead and understand the freight that's on the other side of the network. And by the way, what we did also, and this is the best of both worlds type approach, take a lot of the workflows, take a lot of the tools. Even though we decommissioned Bazooka, there was a lot of interesting tools and functionality that was within the platform, and we then went ahead and migrated that and brought that onto the RXO Connect platform. And as time goes by, our confidence level is high in terms of reaching that 100 basis points of incremental buy rate favorability on purchased transportation.
I think that speaks to just learning the platform and the iteration that's associated with that.
Got it. And maybe flipping a little bit back to the macro, you know, your LTL business has been growing. The LTL industry has had some struggles of late. Can you maybe talk a little bit to your LTL factors?
Yeah. Jordan, I think if you think about our LTL business, so where's our growth coming from? It's coming largely from our truckload customers where, let's say, 90% of their volume is TL, but 10%'s LTL. Well, guess where they spend 90% of their time? It's on LTL. LTL pricing is the eighth wonder of the world. You know, it's very difficult to figure out. You've got to monitor damage claims. So it consumes a lot of their time. So they've come to us and be like, "RXO, you guys do a great job with TL. Can you help me with LTL?" And that's what we did. We helped them. We take it off their plate so they're not spending all their time on such a small part of their business. And, you know, we use, gosh, 50, 60 LTL carriers.
Everybody out here probably thinks there's, oh, there's only four or five, but there's a lot of great regional carriers, you know, that we use provide very good service and so we can help them find the best service, the best price. It just really it's, it's an automated transaction, seamless, and it really takes a headache off of their plate and so if you think about kind of what we're doing from an LTL carrier perspective, think about what we're doing, it's similar to what the IMCs do for the rails. You know, the IMCs are essentially that sales channel for the rails in a way where that sales channel for the LTL carriers. If you talk to any large LTL carrier, ask them who some of their largest customers are, they'll tell you it's a 3PL, 4PL.
Yeah. That makes sense. You know, it's interesting. You guys had some interesting comments on the capacity side, and we touched on it a little bit, capacity rationalization and structural changes that could be underway from a driver perspective, whether it be non-domiciled CDLs, English language proficiency. Can you maybe expand on that a little bit because it does seem to be the topic that generates the most discussion these days?
Yeah. There have been and rightfully so. There have been two major developments in 2025. The first was the executive order, the rules of the road executive order in May of this year where a driver now needs to be proficient in English, so English language proficiency, and needs to be able to go ahead and interpret roadsides. And then there was the interim final rule by the DOT in late September on non-domiciled CDLs. And those two in totality have significantly reduced the amount of capacity that's on the market. And just to sort of frame things up, you know, there are 3.9 million CDLs that are out there, commercial driver's licenses.
The FMCSA has identified about 200,000 that would be at risk as it relates to the interim final ruling in late September were ultimately just not in line with the standards in terms of what must be true to hold a non-domiciled CDL. There have also been further developments in terms of multiple states revoking, in some cases, thousands. California recently revoked 17,000 non-domiciled CDLs. There have been even over the last 48 hours recent developments in other states such as Minnesota, and even the transportation secretary on Monday talked about now targeting some of these CDL mills that are out there, and I think the number that they put up on their website was almost half of the schools that are out there. About 15,000 of them are now at risk at being closed in the next potentially 30 days.
So really significant changes that have happened, and occurred on the supply side. And ultimately, if this enforcement sustains, we believe, which we believe it will, and we believe that'll be the largest structural change to happen in the industry, basically since deregulation in 1980. So a lot has occurred. For a broker like RXO, you know, it's a long-term, you know, not only is it a long-term positive development in terms of just safety on the roads and decreasing fraud and decreasing theft, but I think this speaks to one of the benefits of being a large-scale brokered transportation provider. The fact that we're the third largest in North America. Shippers want confidence that carriers and brokers have very strict compliance standards in terms of the ability to go ahead and actually drive on behalf of RXO.
This is gonna be, you know, you think about just what this means in terms of steady state. It's painful right now, certainly for we talked about that squeeze that's occurring in our brokerage business, for, in the month of October and what's reflected in our Q4 outlook. You fast forward to steady state, this does speak to a lower supply environment and potentially a, you know, longer higher for longer rate environment on the other side of this, and Jordan, you know, maybe in longer term, you know, there's talk too that they might kind of federalize the CDL compliance issuance system similar to passports.
Mm-hmm.
You know, so you have one standard across the entire country versus every state's a little bit different, as we could see. I, I didn't even realize, to Jared's point, you know, there's 15,000, 16,000 of these CDL schools. I had no idea it was that high. That's a big number.
I guess sort of two related questions. Do you see any impact to your network carrier base? And then, do you expect the timeline to accelerate to the point where the structural change potentially on supply, without demand change, you know, the dynamics of the markets?
Let's take that into two. On the first point, our supply base has generally been pretty stable, and I think that goes back to the high-quality carrier base that we have at about 120,000 carriers and 1.6 million power units. You think about one of the attractions on the Coyote acquisition was not only for the lack of customer overlap and the ability to go ahead and scale the business, but the carrier overlap was also none, you know, very little and very complementary. So you think about legacy RXO, more owner-operators, legacy Coyote, larger, medium-sized fleets, and the access to private fleets as well. So I think that really speaks to the breadth of the diversity across the organization, and then your second question was basically, can we have supply-driven inflection, right? For a true sustained inflection, our fundamental belief is we do need an improvement in demand.
But I think the market is showing you right now that despite weak demand, despite what we believe is a muted peak season, you are seeing rates move higher.
Yeah.
So you're certainly seeing spot rates be inflationary in the context of weak demand and lower supply. The question then becomes, for that next leg, you know, I think we could certainly see more supply come out, which would be a tailwind for more rate volatility. But for a true inflection, we're gonna need an improvement in demand. And Jordan, another point to piggyback off that is kind of think about kind of large brokers like us. You know, if you're a shipper, why you use a large broker's strict compliance, strict vetting. You know, we, some of our shippers now requesting a copy of the driver's license before that driver shows up.
Mm-hmm.
You know, so it's very, very, very strict. And going back to that earlier discussion, we're talking about some of the small brokers. That's if you're a large shipper and you're using a small broker, is that a risk you're willing to take? Whereas like us or any other large broker, like, you can as a shipper, you have more confidence that there's much better compliance and vetting and vetting.
Yeah. The margin squeeze dynamics are kind of interesting. Usually, when things are soft, you're not getting squeezed as much as the industry's getting squeezed. So what market conditions have to happen to sort of get the balance back so that your selling I mean, shouldn't your selling prices follow? I mean, they should. You'd think sooner than later. I don't know how your bid process is going or where we are in that, but anyway, maybe share some holistic thoughts around this.
If you think of a good rule of thumb in terms of what must be true to go ahead and start to see some accretive spot opportunities, you want to see tender rejections punch above double digits, right? Right now, they're about 7%. With, by the way, higher year on year, higher versus two and three years ago, despite demand being weaker across that time period, which speaks to the supply that's come out. But you want to see tender rejections not only hit double digits but sustained. That's when you'll start to see, at a minimum, some minimal, some accretive spot opportunities. And then for contract rate inflation, you're gonna want to see spot get at a premium relative to contract, and then contract start to move higher. You know, I think we're in the middle of bid season right now.
Our book turns over on the contract side roughly every 12 months, and the majority of the bids are between October, November, and February timeframe. So I think it's gonna be customer by customer, right? There are some customers who will tell you to price for the environment that you're in. There are some customers who tell you you need to price for the next 12 months to make sure that you can service that freight. I think, you know, the reality is, when you think about just the levers that we have, the levers that the industry has, it comes down to the ability to go ahead and think about where contract prices need to be so we can sustainably and reliably service freight and also earn an acceptable margin.
And then ultimately, if we get to a tighter environment and you start to see some accretive spots finally enter the mix, you know, you'll see we saw this during COVID. You see this during most upturns. You know, imagine almost a sine curve where that'll mimic the profitability of the contractual book of business. And when things get tighter, the profitability of the contractual business declines. But to your point, what then typically happens is you have spots that not only offset but more than offset.
Right.
And COVID was a great example where, you know, the contract book of business was hurt from a profitability standpoint, but it was also the highest profitability in the company's history because the spots came in and really more than offset that. So what's going on right now is unprecedented because you're having weaker demand combined with higher PT costs, which is why I sort of fast forward to what this means in terms of steady state. It's a really good thing longer term, but clearly painful in the interim.
Yeah. Remind again where we are in your contract for spot mix, and then how does that flex when we get to an inflection?
So last quarter, our contract mix was about 71% of our total truckload volume. And, you know, that's on the higher side. And what typically happens is, you know, and this is an important point, when the market tightens, we're still gonna haul the same contractual freight, but then you're gonna have the ability to actually have some spot opportunities. So it's not like we're, you know, purposely flexing to go to spot away from contract because our fundamental belief and our premise is that we're gonna get those spot opportunities, we're gonna get the projects, we're gonna get the mini-bids because we're servicing that contractual freight so well. And last quarter, we made the point on the call to mention that industry-wide tender rejections were, you know, 6% plus in the quarter.
RXO's internal tender rejections were only 2% because you need, especially during tough times, you have to service that freight from the shipper standpoint very well.
So squeeze may continue. The good news would be that you're just pumping more into the higher-priced spot market to outweigh that.
Absolutely. Right. Where the squeeze is ultimately a very good thing, right? We've had these episodic squeezes for the last three and a half years. We talk about, you know, the bad squeeze versus the good squeeze. You know, the episodic squeezes that have occurred over the last three and a half years, it's you get an event, whether it's Roadcheck week, whether it's an event in terms of storm, whether it's 100 Days of Summer. And then what happens is you see elevated tender rejections, and then you always revert back to the prior period baseline. This has now been happening for the last three and a half years because there's been too much supply relative to demand. Fast forward now, I mean, this has been now going on since September. We'll see if this sustains.
But if this gets to the point where, you know, we continue to get squeezed, right? Ultimately, if the squeeze is sustaining, but then that means that there's pressure on waterfall routing guides, and it means that there's spot opportunities. It means there's the potential for contract rate increases in the future. That's a really good thing.
Right. And Jordan, you know, I think just so much supplies come out where we're in a pretty precarious situation where it won't take much on the demand side to kind of tip this market.
Yeah. No, agreed. Before I move on to another question, I just wanted to ask on the PT side of the equation, can you remind a bit on the timeline for when you believe you'll start to see real gains made on that?
On purchased transportation, the combined basis between RXO and Coyote, our PT spend within our brokerage business, it's about $4 billion. We believe then we talked about at the time of the acquisition that over time, we believe that we were gonna achieve about 1% PT savings. 1%, $4 billion, $40 million. I think it's also important to recognize that this is unlike cost synergies or operating expense reductions, this is a relative concept, so it depends on what's happening in the market. If you are in an inflationary time period where rates are moving higher, it will serve as cost avoidance. If overall market rates are flat or moving lower, obviously, you'll have the financial impact, and it'll drop through down to the bottom line from gross margin down to EBITDA.
So we've achieved thus far from that May 1st timeframe, which is when we announced that we did the cutover on the carrier side, about 30 to 50 basis points of incremental buy rate favorability. We always buy better than market. The belief was that post-Coyote, we will buy even better than the market to the tune of 100 basis points. So we've achieved about 30 to 50 basis points. And the timeframe to getting to 100 basis points, we believe, is about a one-year mark from the time of carrier cutover. So call it May next year.
Okay. All right. Good. You know, sort of in the broker world, the logistics world, a lot of discussion on AI across the universe. Can you maybe talk a little bit about AI, your uses of technology, what maybe some of the things you've done and tease, perhaps, of what's to come next, and how do you equate that to tangible benefit at this point?
Yeah. We'd love to. We fundamentally believe that AI has the ability to structurally improve operating margins for RXO longer term. We've embraced leveraging different types of AI techniques for a long, long time, started with our machine learning algorithms over a decade ago. More recently, it's leveraging agentic AI. It's leveraging, it's leveraging GenAI. It all starts with clean data, as my CTO, you know, constantly reminds me. You need to make sure that it's a clean data set, and we have now migrated that data from legacy RXO and legacy Coyote into one clear data lake. Building on that data lake, you then have an orchestration layer, and then sitting on top of the orchestration layer, you've got the ability to deploy multiple agents across the organization. So the ability to go ahead and leverage AI to improve productivity.
Our productivity over the last two years is up 38%, and we are in the early innings if we look at who, you know, the most productive rep in the company versus the least productive rep. That gap is wide, and there's the ability to go ahead and close that gap significantly over time. We think productivity will continue to be a benefit for RXO over the near and long term. But then, you know, you think about other ways to deploy agentic AI internally, not only from a cost or a productivity standpoint, but the ability to unlock incremental margin in terms of top of funnel. How do we go ahead and make our people more productive so that there are AI agents that are living inside your inbox that are, you know, not only, you know, and it's not just about leveraging an agent.
It's leveraging an agent with our proprietary data. That's what's so key. So the ability to go ahead and leverage that proprietary data, respond to customers in a very quick way, unlock that margin opportunity, I think is very significant. We talked about on the earnings call how we're already leveraging it within our last mile business. If you think about a home installation, go ahead and make sure that everything is installed correctly and then inspecting that on the back end. How can we leverage AI to go ahead and do that instead of on a manual basis? Leveraging it on the carrier side in terms of agentic AI. We've talked about reducing over 10,000-plus hours of human labor associated with that. We've talked about deploying millions of lines of code leveraging AI.
I could talk about this for a long, long time because we are really excited about it, and we do believe that heading into 2026, we are reaching closer to an inflection point on our ability to deploy not only some of the tools that are already in the organization but additional tools that can help both unlock incremental margin dollars on the top line as well as improvement in productivity and SG&A.
Jordan, just to.
Yeah.
Going back to the conversation of, like, scale and everything, that's our advantage that we have and other large brokers have, once again, compared to smaller brokers.
I mean, is it clearly the productivity benefits are making a lot of sense. Is it from a headcount perspective, does it just mean the existing worker works better, so you need to add less people when things get better, or do you actually manage headcount at some point through AI?
I'm glad you asked that because I want to emphasize this point. We are not a technology company. We are a tech-enabled organization, and our fundamental belief that we are going to be successful longer term by marrying technology with the best people and operators in the business. So we are deploying tech. We are deploying AI to make our people more productive, not replace our people. And then longer term, how do we go ahead and make sure that we are earning a proper ROIC and we are investing over $100 million a year? There's an expectation that those individuals can be more productive longer term because this business is all about incremental margins. If you think about our incremental margins in the brokerage space, they can be, depending if it's volume or price, anywhere from, you know, 50%-85%.
So if we have the ability to go ahead and deploy AI, deploy tech, make our people more productive, grow volume, longer term, grow headcount longer term as well, but not nearly at the rate of our volume growth because we're leveraging that tech effectively, those incremental margins on a business that's currently generating low single-digit EBITDA margins is pretty impactful to the P&L.
Yeah, well, somehow we've run out of time here. Maybe next time we should start with AI.
Yeah.
Although we might not get to the.
Yeah. Exactly.
Fundamentals, but, any final words before we end it?
No. Thanks for having us. And I want to just reiterate one of the points that I mentioned earlier. When you think about how RXO is set up for long-term success, the integration of Coyote is behind us. We believe it is a transformative acquisition that positions us incredibly well over the long term as the third largest provider of brokered transportation in North America. And we're looking forward to getting back to the path of significant volume outperformance and profitable growth longer term and believe that longer term, you know, as the third largest provider of managed brokered transportation in North America, we have a huge opportunity to execute against a $400 billion market.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Jordan.
Thank you.