What happens when robots take over the movement of goods?
Twelve months ago, robotics in logistics was mostly pilots and demo videos. That has changed. In January, Aurora and McLeod Software connected driverless trucks to a TMS for the first time, and Russell Transport is already tendering autonomous loads from the same McLeod screens it uses for every other load. At the dock, DHL has signed for more than 1,000 additional Boston Dynamics Stretch robots that unload trailers at up to 700 cases an hour. And in the 2025 MHI study, 48% of respondents were already using robots, up from 23% in 2022.
So here is one shipment, end to end, with Zoree TMS in the middle of it.
Every step below is a message between systems. None of them is a person typing a status.
The carrier accepts the tender in Zoree TMS. Tender accept and decline responses come in through an API. Each response updates the shipment and its linked orders, writes to the change history, and pushes the new status live to every open screen.
When the shipment was planned, Zoree assigned the dock door and the loading window at the same time, using the warehouse’s operating hours, which doors are already occupied, and a load duration by mode. Those durations are planning parameters, so when robots load faster than a crew, the windows can be shortened to match.
The shipment goes to the WMS and on to the robotic control system. Humanoid robots pick, pack, stage and load the trailer.
The warehouse sends ship confirm, and the status flips to Picked Up and In Transit on its own. The linked orders move to Shipped, and every open Orders and Shipments screen refreshes live.
An autonomous truck moves the load. Carrier status updates stream straight back into the TMS. To Zoree, an autonomous fleet is a carrier with an API: rates, tender, tender response, status events and invoices, the same as any other carrier.
Proof of delivery comes back through the same kind of event, and the shipment closes. Nobody had to chase a POD.
Robots speed up execution, and when execution gets faster, every gap in the plan costs more. A manual crew absorbs a sloppy dock schedule by waiting around. A robot you paid for absorbs it by sitting still.
Most dock schedules are built on how long a human crew takes. Out of the box, Zoree uses 120 minutes for a truckload and 90 for LTL. If your docks now run robots, a 120-minute window is too long, and every appointment after it on that door is wrong too. In Zoree you change the load duration per mode and the next plan is built on how fast your dock actually runs.
Shippers and carriers didn’t want a separate system for driverless trucks. They wanted to tender, dispatch and track them in the TMS they already use. Our team completes external carrier integrations within hours, not days, and every load is rated across your carrier base with SMC³ CzarLite, PC*MILER and CarrierConnect alongside your contract rates, so autonomous lanes are compared on the same basis as every other option.
When a person, a carrier system, a warehouse robot and an AI agent can all change the same shipment, you need to know which one did what. Zoree records every change at field level, with who made it and when, and logs every inbound and outbound message in one ledger. When a load goes wrong, you can rebuild the sequence instead of guessing.
Robots take physical work off the floor. The same shift is happening at the planning desk. ZoreeAI, the assistant built into Zoree TMS, reads live operational data and carries out actions on request: rate a lane, tender a load, update orders, create an invoice. Every action shows a confirmation card that a person approves before anything changes.
Entering an order by hand takes about a minute. With the assistant it takes about ten seconds. That is the model robotics needs at the planning layer: automation does the repetitive work at machine speed, a person approves the decisions that matter, and the audit trail records both.
1. Dock load times: do your appointment windows reflect your automated docks, or the crew you had before? 2. Carrier onboarding: could you add an autonomous carrier to a live lane in days, not a quarter? 3. Event latency: do warehouse and carrier events reach your TMS in seconds, or in a nightly batch? 4. Audit trail: can you see every field change, who or what made it, and when? 5. Exception ownership: when a robot, a truck or a carrier reports a problem, does it land with a named owner? If two or more are a no, your next robotics dollar will be held back by your transportation plan.
That is the flow Zoree TMS is built around: dock doors and loading windows planned with every shipment, every load rated across your carrier base, carrier and warehouse events taken by API, and a field-level record of every change, whether a person, a system or an AI agent made it.
Watch the demo, or bring us your dock and carrier setup and we’ll walk through how it would flow.