The word for what exponential technology is doing to logistics, and the gap between what every leader knows is coming and what almost none of them are ready for.
Logistechs represent the impact that exponential technologies have on logistics: the ones that support the transportation of goods, the ones that improve their handling, and the ones that streamline their customs clearance.
Recognition is nearly universal. Readiness is rare. That 71-point spread is the Logistechs Readiness Gap, the number this framework exists to close, and it is widest exactly where I work: at the border, in the family businesses that move most of the freight.
Technologies that enhance the movement of goods across supply chains.
Technologies that improve warehouse operations and goods management.
Technologies that accelerate cross-border trade processes.
The solid bar is adoption today; the lighter bar is where leaders expect to be within five years. Every technology moves up and to the right, but the steepest climbs, AI and blockchain, start from almost nothing.
“The companies that survive won't be the strongest or the most intelligent. They'll be the ones that best adapt to change.”
The Logistechs thesis, after Darwin. The border proves it every quarter: the firms that move freight through uncertainty are not the biggest. They are the ones that adapted first.
Individual technologies improve operations. But when AI meets IoT meets blockchain meets autonomous systems, the effect isn't additive. It's multiplicative.
Logistechs was coined in Laredo, and Laredo is where it gets tested. The TAMIU Logistechs Living Lab is the first logistics-digitalization lab focused on cross-border flows, sitting at the #1 inland port on the U.S.–Mexico border. Living Lab sessions bring startups to demo AI, digital twins, and IoT to the working logistics community. What proves out here scales to the continent.
Watch it happen, live at Port Laredo →Most of the border economy runs on family-owned forwarders, brokers, and carriers, not Fortune 500 logistics arms. They feel the gap hardest: the technology is real, but the readiness, capital, and talent are scarce. The path is not a moonshot.
Digitize one painful, repeatable process: tracking, documents, or a single customs workflow. Prove the return before scaling spend.
The constraint is rarely the tool. It's the team. Build the literacy to run and trust the system before you grow it.
Connect the proven pieces into one flow. The compounding starts when the tools stop being islands.
The framework that names what exponential technology is doing to trade. Daniel keynotes it for industry, government, and university audiences, in English or Spanish, and is writing the book.
Logistechs coined by Daniel Covarrubias, 2021, first published in the Wilson Quarterly. Survey figures from industry logistics-technology research. Tracked live on the Laredo corridor dashboard.