Agentic TMS Has an Identity Problem

 

I spent part of my career selling supply chain software, and I now write about identity security. For most of those years, those were two separate conversations. In 2026 they are the same one, and transportation management is where they collide.

Two trends are converging. Transportation management systems are going agentic, handing AI agents the authority to negotiate rates, book carriers, and clear exceptions on their own. At the same time, freight fraud has quietly become an identity crime, with criminals hijacking carrier identities and compromised accounts to steal loads on paper before anyone touches a truck. Put those together and the conclusion is uncomfortable. Agentic TMS is an identity problem before it is a logistics one, and the industry is automating the exact attack surface criminals are already working.

What is agentic TMS, and why does it change the risk picture?

An agentic TMS is a transportation platform where AI agents make and act on operational decisions rather than waiting for a human to configure a rule or approve a recommendation. Earlier systems optimized routes and flagged exceptions for a person to handle. The new generation books the carrier, negotiates the rate, schedules the appointment, and resolves the exception on its own.

Gartner's 2026 Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems names this shift directly, pointing to the rapid adoption of AI agents to automate tasks such as appointment scheduling, exception handling, and freight procurement. Vendors are shipping these capabilities into platforms that already sit at the center of an API-first ecosystem, wired to the ERP, the warehouse system, EDI networks, telematics providers, carrier systems, and external AI services.

That connectivity is the entire point of a modern TMS, and it is also what changes the risk picture. Every one of those connections is a door, and an autonomous agent now holds the keys to walk through them without asking.

Why is agentic TMS an identity problem?

Because every agent acting inside that system is an identity, and most of them are barely governed.

An AI agent that books freight authenticates as something to reach the load board, the carrier API, the rate engine, and the payment step. It holds credentials, and the more it does, the more access it accumulates across the partner ecosystem. These are non-human identities, and they now carry the authority to move freight and money. I wrote about this category in Non-Human Identities and AI Agents: The New Blind Spot in Your IAM Program, and transportation is where the blind spot stops being theoretical.

The uncomfortable part is that logistics already runs on trust it does not verify. When an agent hands a load to a carrier, the decision rests on whether that carrier is who it claims to be. In freight, that claim is exactly what criminals have learned to forge.

How do attackers already exploit identity in freight?

Constantly, and through identity rather than force. The fastest-growing category of cargo theft is strategic theft, where criminals take legitimate control of a shipment on paper and then disappear with it. It now accounts for close to a third of reported cargo theft in some datasets, up from a small share a few years ago.

The mechanics are pure identity attack:

• Carrier identity theft, where criminals hijack a real company's motor carrier number, insurance certificates, and email domain, so the paperwork checks out because it belongs to someone else.
• Double brokering, where a load is re-handed to an unauthorized carrier without the shipper's knowledge, a scheme that accounts for an estimated $500 million to $700 million in freight loss each year.
• Compromised accounts, where actors reach into broker and carrier systems through spoofed emails and fake links, then post fraudulent listings to hijack and reroute freight.

That last pattern is not my characterization. In April 2026 the FBI warned publicly that cyber threat actors are increasingly impersonating legitimate businesses to hijack freight and reroute deliveries, gaining access through spoofed emails, fake URLs, and compromised carrier accounts. The operational data reaches the same conclusion. Highway's Q4 2025 freight fraud index reported that across every fraud vector, the same weakness surfaces: identity and authorization get taken on trust instead of checked. In a single year the company blocked nearly two million fraudulent email attempts, more than double the year before.

Sit with that finding, because it is the whole argument. Identity is taken on trust rather than verified. That was already the industry's core vulnerability while humans were doing the booking.

What happens when you add autonomous agents to that?

You scale it. An agent that books at machine speed does not pause to notice that a carrier reactivated after months dormant, or that a contact email sits on a free domain, or that a rate runs suspiciously below market. Those are the human instincts that catch strategic theft, and autonomy removes the human.

Then add the second exposure. The agents themselves are targets. An agent identity with authority to onboard a carrier, release a load, or approve a payment is a credential worth stealing, and a compromised or impersonated agent can move real freight and real money before anyone notices. Enterprises are learning this same lesson in software development, where autonomous agents that hold credentials become an execution path into the business. I covered that dynamic in AI Is Writing Your Code and Leaking Your Secrets, and the principle carries straight into freight. An ungoverned agent identity is a liability whether it is writing code or booking a truck.

The trouble is that adoption is outrunning governance. Vendors are shipping agentic features into platforms faster than most operations are building the identity controls to contain them.

To be clear, this is a risk arriving rather than one already cataloged. I am not aware of a public case of an autonomous freight agent being hijacked to date. But the fraud playbook already targets the exact trust these agents automate, and identity controls take time to stand up, which is the argument for building them ahead of the incident instead of after it.

How do you secure an agentic TMS?

You secure it by governing the agent identities with the same rigor you would give any party that can move your freight or your money. The controls are not exotic. They are the identity discipline logistics has under-applied for years, now made mandatory by autonomy.

• Give every agent its own scoped identity. Name it, and grant least-privilege access to only the systems and actions its job requires, so a compromised agent cannot reach the whole ecosystem.
• Keep credentials short-lived. Replace standing keys with credentials that expire quickly, so a stolen one is worth little.
• Put a human in the loop for high-consequence actions. Carrier onboarding, load release, and payment approval are exactly where identity fraud pays off, so an agent should propose these and a person should confirm them.
• Verify carriers actively, not on documents alone. Feed the agent real verification, cross-checked authority, direct insurance confirmation, and known-partner networks, because paperwork is the thing criminals forge.
• Monitor and inventory every non-human identity. Each agent needs an owner, a logged trail of what it did, and a decommission date, so nothing acts unwatched.

None of this asks you to slow the platform down. It asks you to make sure the speed belongs to you, and not to whoever learns to impersonate your agents.

These controls are not new inventions either. They map to an existing category of non-human and workload identity management, supported by secrets managers that issue and expire credentials, and active carrier verification is already a product in the market, sold by Highway among others. Policy is moving in the same direction, with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the Transportation Intermediaries Association both pushing on carrier identity verification and double brokering. The tooling and the rules are catching up. The open question is whether your agent governance keeps pace with your agent adoption.

I write about where identity security meets commercial reality, because in transportation they are now the same problem. If your operation is adopting agentic logistics and working through what it means for security, connect with me on LinkedIn.

Frequently asked questions

What is an agentic TMS?

An agentic transportation management system is one where AI agents make and act on operational decisions on their own, such as negotiating rates, booking carriers, scheduling appointments, and resolving exceptions, rather than only recommending actions for a human to approve. The agents operate across the platform's connections to carriers, load boards, ERP, and payment systems.

Is agentic TMS safe to use?

It can be, but only with identity governance in place. The agents hold credentials and the authority to move freight and money, and freight fraud is already an identity crime. Safe adoption depends on scoping each agent's access, verifying carriers actively, and keeping a human in the loop for high-consequence actions like onboarding and payment.

What is carrier identity theft?

Carrier identity theft is when criminals hijack a legitimate carrier's motor carrier number, insurance certificates, and email domain to impersonate them. The stolen identity lets them win and pick up loads that check out on paper, then divert the freight. It is a leading method behind the rise in strategic cargo theft.

How do you keep AI freight agents from being hijacked?

Treat each agent as a governed non-human identity. Give it a scoped, least-privilege identity, issue short-lived credentials, require human confirmation for onboarding, load release, and payment, and monitor every agent's activity with a clear owner and audit trail. The point is to make a stolen or spoofed agent identity useless.

Governance is what lets logistics run agents

Agentic TMS is a real advance, and the operations adopting it will move faster than the ones that do not. The mistake would be to treat the autonomy as free. It arrives inside an industry where fraud already works by forging identity, and where verification too often stops at documents, and it hands that environment agents with the authority to act.

The answer is not to hold back the technology. It is to govern the identities that make it work. Scope the agents, verify the carriers, keep a person on the decisions that move money, and watch every non-human identity in the system. Do that, and agentic TMS protects your freight, your margins, and your speed at once. Skip it, and you have simply handed the criminals a faster way in.

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Navneet Lounsberry writes on cybersecurity and commercial strategy, drawing on more than two decades in enterprise technology sales and business development across IBM, SAP, Manhattan Associates, and UKG.

 

 

Copyright © 2026, Full Throttle Media, Inc. FTM #fullthrottlemedia #inthespread #sethhorne

How Enterprises Actually Buy Cybersecurity

 

The best security product in the room loses deals all the time. Not to a stronger competitor, but to a buying process the vendor never learned to read.

That is the uncomfortable truth underneath one of the largest budgets in technology. Gartner's latest forecast puts worldwide spending on information security north of $240 billion in 2026, and most of the companies competing for it believe they lose deals on features, price, or timing. They are usually wrong. You rarely lose a security deal on the merits alone. You lose it in the gap between how security teams sell and how enterprises actually buy.

Closing that gap is not a technical skill. It is a commercial one, and it can be learned.

How do enterprises actually buy cybersecurity?

Enterprises buy cybersecurity by committee, slowly, and mostly without you in the room. Gartner's 2025 buyer research puts modern B2B buying groups at anywhere from five to 16 people across as many as four functions. In enterprise security, that group often includes a CISO, a security architect, a compliance lead, a procurement officer, a budget owner, and legal, each carrying a different definition of what good looks like. The exact mix shifts with the category and the trigger. An incident, an audit finding, a renewal, a merger, or a board mandate can reshape both who sits on the committee and how fast it moves.

Here is the part sellers underestimate. Gartner's research shows buyers spend only about 17 percent of the purchase journey meeting with potential suppliers, and an even thinner sliver of that with any single vendor when they are comparing several. You are not the main character in this decision. You are a supporting reference the committee consults briefly and then debates without you. In cybersecurity, more often than not, the party with a seat in that room is a channel partner rather than the vendor, which is a commercial discipline of its own.

By the time sales enters, the buyer's preference is often already taking shape. 6sense found that the vendor a buying group ranks first at the end of the selection phase goes on to win about 80 percent of the time. That is a broad B2B pattern rather than a security-specific law, but it holds. The real work of selling happens before the first call, in the reputation, the content, and the peer conversations that shaped that ranking.

Now the core mismatch. Security teams and vendors sell the way engineers think, in features, threats, and technical superiority. Enterprises buy the way executives decide, in risk reduction, business enablement, and political cover for the person whose name goes on the decision. Those are different languages. The vendor who speaks only the first one loses to the vendor who speaks both.

Technical validation still matters, and in security it matters a great deal. The product has to clear the architecture review, the integration test, and the security questionnaire. But clearing those gates does not create a budget, a consensus, or a decision the committee feels safe defending. Technical merit gets you considered. It rarely closes the deal on its own.

Why do good security teams and vendors lose winnable deals?

Because their toughest competitor is not another vendor. It is the buyer deciding to do nothing.

The research is blunt about how often that happens. Analyzing more than 2.5 million recorded sales conversations, the team behind the JOLT Effect found that 40 to 60 percent of deals end in no decision, even after the buyer signals a clear intent to purchase. The reason is not laziness or a simple preference for the status quo. In that research, 56 percent of no-decision outcomes traced to fear of making the wrong choice.

That fear has a structural cause. Gartner found that 74 percent of buying teams experience unhealthy conflict during the decision, and that more than three quarters of buyers describe their last purchase as very complex or difficult. A committee that cannot resolve its own disagreement does not pick you or a competitor. It postpones, and the deal quietly dies.

Good security vendors lose winnable deals for a short list of repeatable reasons:

• They sell to the technical champion and never reach the economic buyer who controls the budget.
• They present capabilities instead of quantifying the cost of doing nothing.
• They cannot answer "why now," so the purchase slides to next quarter and then off the table.
• They give the buyer no political cover, no defensible business case or reference story that makes the decision safe to explain to the board, the CFO, or the next audit.
• They treat a rival vendor as the threat, while indecision walks off with the deal.

None of these are product failures. Every one is a translation failure.

What actually closes an enterprise security deal?

You close it by selling the way the enterprise buys. No five moves guarantee a signature, but these do most of the work.

First, translate the risk into a budget consequence the economic buyer owns. A control gap is abstract. A quantified exposure tied to a number on their budget is a decision they can defend. I wrote about this exact failure in Why Identity Risk Loses the Budget Conversation, and it is the most common place a strong security case falls apart.

Second, multi-thread past the champion. If five to 16 people decide and you know one of them, you are not running the deal, you are hoping. Map the group, learn what each person needs in order to say yes, and give them each a reason.

Third, arm your champion for the room you are not in. The committee debates you without you present, and most of those rooms hold real conflict. Your champion is selling on your behalf whether you helped them or not. Hand them the business case, the answers to the hard questions, and the one-page argument they can carry upstairs.

Fourth, build a real reason to act now, and make sure it is real. Regulatory deadlines are the cleanest source of urgency, but only when the buyer understands the scope, the timing, the enforcement exposure, and the work required to comply. A date on its own does not move a committee. The CMMC timeline shift I covered in CMMC Phase 2 Paused: Why the Work Should Not Stop is a live example of a deadline that moved and left buyers unsure whether to act, and that uncertainty stalls decisions.

Fifth, lower the buyer's career risk. This is the counterintuitive one. Where fear of a wrong decision is the obstacle, piling on more evidence of how bad the status quo is tends to backfire. The JOLT research found that leaning harder on the cost of inaction made things worse more often than not. The buyer already believes they have a problem. What they need is confidence that choosing you is the safe move, not another reason to be afraid.

I write about this intersection of cybersecurity and commercial strategy, because in enterprise security they are the same discipline. If your team is working through a stalled deal or a buying process that will not close, connect with me on LinkedIn.

Frequently asked questions

Who actually decides on a cybersecurity purchase?

Rarely one person. Enterprise security deals commonly involve security, architecture, compliance, procurement, finance, and legal. A technical champion often starts the process, but the budget owner has to carry the business case, and procurement, legal, security architecture, privacy, or executive leadership can reshape or stop the decision.

Why do enterprise security deals stall?

Most stall on internal disagreement, not on the product. Gartner found that 74 percent of buying teams hit unhealthy conflict during the decision, and no decision is a leading cause of lost deals. When a committee cannot align, the safest path for its members is to postpone, and postponement usually ends the deal.

What is the biggest mistake security vendors make?

Selling features to the champion instead of selling business outcomes to the whole committee. A champion who loves the product still has to win an argument with a budget owner and a room full of peers. If you have not given that champion a business case and political cover, you have left them to lose the deal on your behalf.

How long do enterprise cybersecurity sales cycles run?

Complex enterprise deals commonly run several months, and often past a year, because every added stakeholder adds research, review, and another chance to stall. The length is a symptom of the committee dynamic, which is why shortening a cycle depends on reducing internal friction rather than pushing harder.

The skill that decides the deal

Cybersecurity is one of the largest and fastest-growing categories of enterprise spending, and the competition for those budgets is fierce. Yet most of the vendors and internal teams fighting for that money are fighting the wrong battle. They sharpen the product when they should be learning the buyer.

The enterprises writing these checks do not buy the best technology. They buy the case they can defend, from the vendor who made the decision feel safe. The teams that win have stopped treating the sale as something beneath the technology and started treating it as the discipline it is. Translate the risk into money, arm the people who decide, and take the fear out of the choice. That is how enterprises actually buy cybersecurity, and it is how you get them to buy yours.

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Navneet Lounsberry writes on cybersecurity and commercial strategy, drawing on more than two decades in enterprise technology sales and business development across IBM, SAP, Manhattan Associates, and UKG.

Copyright © 2026, Full Throttle Media, Inc. FTM #fullthrottlemedia #inthespread #sethhorne