The Death of Vertical Software

Vertical software was supposed to be the answer. Built specifically for industries like logistics, it promised to simplify operations, encode best practices, and deliver plug-and-play efficiency. But for many transportation companies, it hasn’t played out that way.

Instead, vertical software has become a bottleneck. Rigid workflows, slow innovation, and a disconnect from how operators actually work have led many operations and technology leaders to question whether the tools designed "for them" truly serve them anymore.

How Vertical Software Rose to Power

The idea was simple: instead of customizing a horizontal system to fit logistics workflows, what if you just bought a system built for trucking, brokerages, or warehousing out of the box? That gave rise to vertical software platforms like TMSs and WMSs that promised domain-specific features, regulatory alignment, and built-in best practices.

Vendors pitched these systems as pre-fit suits: you wouldn’t need to tailor them, just put them on and start running. For a while, that worked. Especially in the early days of SaaS, when industry-specific functionality was rare, a vertical tool that understood LTL vs. FTL or freight rating logic was a big deal.

But like any pre-fit suit, it only works if you fit the mold.

Why That Model Is Breaking

If we learned anything in our 10 years of building TMSes, modern logistics isn’t one-size-fits-all. Operations evolve fast and strategies differ. A brokerage specializing in expedited freight looks nothing like a mid-sized carrier. Yet most vertical systems are still designed around a single way of doing things. That means if your workflows don’t match the software’s assumptions, you either:

• Force your team to conform to the tool

• Build painful workarounds

• Or give up and revert to spreadsheets

None of those are good enough.

Even worse, many vertical tools aren’t built to be easily adapted. Because they were designed to be prescriptive, their flexibility is limited. You’ll often hear users say things like: "We wanted to use the TMS for this workflow, but it doesn’t support multi-leg loads with variable rate structures, so we still track those separately."

That’s how shelfware happens.

The Failure Rate Problem

It’s not just theory. The failure rates for vertical software implementations are alarming: Over 70% of digital transformation projects (including ERP and logistics system rollouts) fail to meet objectives (McKinsey, 2020). In transportation, implementation failure often stems from workflows not matching the tool and low user adoption

The most common cause? The software didn’t fit how the business actually works.

The Illusion of Best Practices

Vertical vendors love to talk about built-in best practices. But here’s the truth: there’s no universal best practice in logistics. Every operation has its edge cases, exceptions, and tribal knowledge. When software assumes there is one "right" way to run a load or invoice a customer, it ends up creating friction instead of removing it.

This is the same problem AI tools face when they lack context. They guess. And in logistics, guessing leads to bad calls.

What Operators Actually Need

What logistics leaders want isn’t a rigid system that tells them how to run. They want a platform that:

• Understands their existing workflows

• Lets them customize processes without code

• Can evolve as their business changes

• Embeds intelligence that sees the full picture

In other words, software that adapts to the business, not the other way around.

That’s what modern TMS platforms like TMS.ai are built around. Rather than locking you into someone else's assumptions, they deploy into your environment, learn how your business actually runs, and support the workflows that matter most.

The Future: Contextual Platforms, Not Prescriptive Suites

The death of vertical software doesn’t mean the end of industry-specific tooling. It means the end of inflexible, prescriptive systems that can’t keep up with operational reality.

The winners in logistics tech will be platforms that are:

• Context-aware

• Configurable without complexity

• Grounded in real operations, not imagined best practices

Because in a world where agility is everything, rigidity is a liability.

It’s time to stop working around software, and start working with software that works around you.