Logistics Management Group News Editor Jeff Berman recently spoke with Jett McCandless, Founder and CEO of Chicago-based project44, a provider of supply chain visibility services. McCandless provided detailed overview of project44’s strategic focus and initiatives, as well as offering up insights on how the company is leveraging AI, supply chain visibility, and the logistics impact of the Iran conflict, among other topics. Their conversation follows below.
Logistics Management (LM): In its most recent earnings release, project44 said that multi-year agreements accounted for 73% of annual recurring revenue (ARR), representing a big driver for the success last quarter and last year. What drove that, in your opinion?
Jett McCandless: The multi-year percentage of ARR is getting larger, and I think there’s a couple of signals in there. One is that it means that the market has more confidence in the vendor selection process. And the market also has more confidence in the product value. What I mean by the first point is that I think was pretty difficult for the market before to decide: is it competitor A, B or project44 they should go with? And in the absence of that clarity, they naturally want lower-duration contracts. They can mitigate their risk, in case they selected the wrong vendor, and in case there was one that started to perform better throughout this kind of innovative cycle. And, so, what’s happened is the market has clearly said that we are the winner and the leader and visibility. The second thing is, we offer more than visibility. We have the Decision Intelligence Platform that has Intelligent TMS, visibility, yard management and last-mile. The market is also saying, well, that really aligns well with their needs from technology, so let’s sign a longer contract so that they can buy more products for longer durations, and so they can extract more value and build more processes around it.
LM: In the earnings release you made a comment about the company’s long-term platform strategy in terms of, it doesn’t just show you what’s happening, but it also predicts what’s coming and takes action automatically. In a way, it sort of describes, how impactful your AI offering is and has become over the years. Does that address other things as well?
McCandless: That is spot on. I think the market is also saying AI is incredibly important. Our ideal customer profiles are global 2000 companies, and they’re saying they don’t want to go and build all this AI and all this infrastructure. In some cases, they do, and there’s value to it. But when it comes to logistics and supply chain, they’re looking for the AI to be embedded into the technology platform that they select, and specifically, because they don’t want to deal with the security, they don’t want to have to retool, do major overhauls to the talent that they have, and they also need context for the AI work. We have all that, and it’s already set up, and it’s literally clicks, not code, so the time to value is faster. That’s really clear from the market, too. When we talk about AI, it’s kind of a couple steps. With the Decision Intelligence Platform, you’re predicting what’s happened. We’ve been doing that for quite some time. And then you can actually help. I think of it in three different stages. Step one is to support with AI, and we’ve been doing that for really a couple years. The second is to augment, which is really where agents come in to a lot. The third is to automate. And we’re at that point on certain parts of the workflow and logistics work. There’s not even a human in the loop anymore. It’s just doing work and getting it done. And I think the confidence in the market in that is reflective in the numbers,
LM: Do those three stages serve as the cornerstones for the Intelligent TMS project44 rolled out last year?
McCandless: Yes, they do. Our platform, in its simplest way, is really for four different layers. The first is to connect. It’s kind of one the many API layers that we that we built, with that data fabric, connective tissue. The second layer is transportation visibility, in terms of things like sailing schedules from the carriers, what’s happening at the terminals and the ports, what’s happening with all the current events. And there’s AI and connect, because not only do we have APIs now, but we also have agents connecting to the carriers. And we have a lot of agents that are being active there. It’s great to have high fidelity data and to connect. It’s great to be able to see what’s happening, but it’s kind of like, so what? Which is the third layer, which is to be able to act on it, so you can act with physical humans. You can have digital agents do the acting. The fourth is when you can pull this all together and be able to automate these decisions, either with a human in the loop or a human out of the loop.
LM: In a recent LinkedIn post, you said the following: “The reality in 2026 is that the intelligence layer sitting on top of your operations is now the most strategically sensitive link in your supply chain.” That’s probably not something that a lot of people were really thinking about even just a few years ago, but things have just rapidly evolved, obviously. Do you see shippers embracing that approach of the intelligence layer sitting on top of operations being the most strategically sensitive link in the chain? It’s starting to feel that way.
McCandless: I think so. I mean, I could just look at the data, which is the financial performance, and in a that is a bit of a lagging indicator as to what the market’s done, because just the contract piece is often three-to-four months. If you think about that deals that we sign, using the fourth quarter results, those are decisions that were made late last summer. When I look for more leading indicators, I look at just usage of the platform and usage of the AI agents and tokens themselves and outcomes that are created, and that’s all growing like a hockey stick. The shipment transaction count is also growing in the platform, but it’s not growing at the same rate as the actual outcome and agent transactions. But if I also look at the individual customer level, shipment volume is relatively flat, which it kind of always is on these mature companies—you don’t see Starbucks have a 20% spike, for example. It’s relatively flat for these mature companies that kind of grows like GDP rates plus or minus. But the agent and AI usage is growing at a parabolic rate within each customer base in the platform. That just tells me that there’s a lot more value being created, and leaders know they want this intelligence in their operations.
LM: With project44 having significant exposure to a varied shipper client base across so many different verticals, are there things you are hearing from shippers, especially these days, as it relates to their biggest challenges and concerns?
McCandless: I think the main things that these shippers tend to be thinking about right now is that the speed of disruptions is happening at a faster pace than it ever has before, and they just don’t have the ability internally to make decisions as fast as they need to with the tooling and investments that have made historically. The other thing that they are nervous about is AI itself. How does it impact their organization? What are their competitors doing? But, also, how does it change demand planning? For example, how demand cycles used to be done is so much different now. If there is an irregular weather event, with a nice day amid a series of bad ones, people are going to grill, get car wash stuff, and buy shorts, frisbees as part of a surge. And companies are also going to do advertisements on Tiktok and Instagram, which is going to create these surges that aren’t in these normal cycles. It costs money to do those advertisements. So, if Coca-Cola starts to run out because there’s more Coke during hot days, they don’t want to be spending money on ads locally, here in Chicago, if they don’t have enough supply, because one, you have a negative customer experience, they don’t have the supply. So, in order to do that, not only do you have more disruptions that are happening from geopolitical, kinetic impacts, and tariffs, you also have this demand change that’s happening. Then they have, of course, the AI themselves on how should they approach that and stay competitive in the market. And then they are starting to be concerned about carrier rates rising, which had some really easy years and benefits here recently. But that’s starting to be a challenge too, and just thinking about actual capacity, of pick up and deliver within their service requirements.
LM: The Iran conflict has various logistics ramifications, with oil at the top of the list. What are you hearing from your customers that have exposure to the Middle East and what are some of the things that they’ve been talking to you about, or looking for from project44 to help navigate that type of situation?
McCandless: Since we have the global 2000, one of the things that’s really top of mind is a lot of them have a presence or people or offices in that region of the world where this has kind of expanded into. Getting those people safe is certainly top of mind. The second thing then is, do they have the systems and processes if these people are not available to keep that kind of region of the world moving and operating. Turkey is a really large growing market, but maybe it was serviced out of Dubai from a logistics coordination center, so that’s certainly relevant. When we look at blank sailings, we see a large increase there, because ships are out of cycle, and that’s impacting things across the world itself.
