Dispatch Science at Manifest 2026: Rebuilding the Last-Mile Stack From the Inside Out
At Manifest 2026, Dispatch Science chose a big stage for a very pointed message: the way last-mile carriers run technology has been broken for a long time, and incremental fixes are no longer enough. Instead of adding yet another layer to the familiar patchwork of transportation management systems, integrations, analytics tools, and custom scripts, the company unveiled a unified logistics platform designed to collapse those layers into a single operational core. The pitch is not about one more feature or dashboard, but about removing the structural friction that has defined logistics software for years, the silos, the brittle integrations, the upgrades that quietly break everything you customized just months earlier.
What makes the announcement resonate is the way the platform reframes the old TMS dilemma. Traditionally, carriers had to choose between rigid systems that work on day one but resist change, or highly customized environments that demand constant care and become technical debt almost as soon as they go live. Dispatch Science argues that this is a false choice. By combining an enterprise-grade TMS with DSX, a built-in toolkit for workflow design, automation, and system extension, the platform treats adaptability as a native capability rather than an afterthought. That foundation allows operations teams to encode their real business logic directly into the system, not around it, and to evolve those rules as customers, pricing models, and service levels change. It’s the kind of promise logistics vendors have made before, but rarely with the tooling embedded at the core rather than bolted on.
Arthur Axelrad, Co-founder and CEO of Dispatch Science, put it bluntly when describing the problem the industry has been living with. According to Axelrad, the last-mile world has been stuck choosing between systems that function out of the box but can’t adapt, and platforms that require endless customization and maintenance. His argument is that a third path is now viable, one where enterprise-level operations are available immediately, while the ability to build and extend is preserved without forcing companies to start over every time their business shifts. It’s an appealing narrative, especially for carriers that have grown through acquisitions or that serve enterprise shippers with highly specific operational demands.
The DSX layer is central to that story. Already supporting millions of deliveries each year, it allows logistics teams to inject custom business rules, automate decisions in real time, and connect to external systems without destabilizing the core platform. Integration is handled through a logistics-specific layer that unifies APIs, EDI, and file exchanges, while operational data can be replicated in real time into customer-managed environments for reporting, internal analytics, or downstream systems. A dedicated analytics and reporting environment, scheduled to arrive this spring, is positioned as the final piece, giving carriers control over dashboards, branded documents, and visualizations that actually reflect how their business runs, not how a vendor assumes it should.
What quietly underpins all of this is an AI layer that operates directly inside day-to-day workflows. Rather than acting as a separate analytics product, it continuously optimizes routing, pricing, driver coaching, and settlement decisions as work is being executed. The idea is that efficiency gains and service improvements emerge automatically from the system’s normal operation, not from manual analysis sessions after the fact. Alex Proteau, Co-founder and CTO of Dispatch Science, framed this as the end of disconnected logistics systems, arguing that execution, integration, automation, and intelligence finally need to live together if carriers want to scale without being constrained by their tools.
The company’s commitment to an eight-week release cycle reinforces the same theme. Updates are meant to arrive fast enough to keep pace with market changes, but within an architecture designed to protect stability at scale. It’s a subtle but important signal to an industry that has learned to fear upgrades as much as it wants new features. Whether Dispatch Science’s unified approach becomes a new default for last-mile operations remains to be seen, but the announcement at Manifest 2026 makes one thing clear: the conversation is shifting away from adding more software, and toward rebuilding the logistics stack so it can finally bend without breaking.