Highlights from Elevate Freight Summit

In June 2026, 65+ procurement and logistics leaders across 47 companies joined Archlet at The Circle Convention Center at Zurich Airport for Archlet's first Elevate Freight Summit: a full day dedicated to the future of freight sourcing in an era of structural volatility and agentic AI.

Setting the scene

Archlet Co-Founder Lukas Wawrla opened the day by framing why the room was there: the freight sourcing questions hitting his inbox every week. Teams pausing RFPs mid-flight, procurement leaders making sense of 20 new surcharges from a single carrier.

Lukas traced Archlet's journey from the broken trade-off of 2019, where procurement teams were forced to choose between smart tools and usable ones. To today's agentic sourcing era, where AI agents handle RFP setup, bid analytics, and scenario building. He also shared a look at what's coming on the product roadmap: a Xeneta integration for rate benchmarking, a Supplier Discovery Agent powered by Spark AI, and autonomous sourcing for tactical and tail spend.

Alina Heimgartner and Marco Krebs followed with insights from 80+ Archlet freight customers. The numbers tell a clear story: freight sourcing in Archlet has grown 19x from 2022 to 2025, and 2026 is already 45% ahead of last year in just five months. Freight has gone from 6–9% of all sourcing activity on Archlet to 48% year-to-date. In 2026 alone, over 800,000 lanes have been sourced, with road freight now representing 69% of all freight events.

Mohawk customer spotlight

Krzysztof Zak, Global Category Director for Logistics and Indirect Procurement at Mohawk Industries, delivered the morning's customer spotlight, sharing how Mohawk built its new global Procurement Center of Excellence in Lucerne and scaled Archlet from a freight pilot into a multi-category tool.

Before Archlet, Mohawk had no dedicated sourcing solution for freight. Complex RFIs, manual analysis, and tools that were powerful but hard to adopt meant the team was always playing catch-up. Krzysztof described the turning point as finding a platform where people could become productive almost immediately.

The results speak for themselves. Across a global ocean freight tender, Mohawk invited 41 suppliers across three negotiation rounds, achieved a 12.25% first-to-last round price decrease, and used Spark AI for incumbent performance analysis.

For road freight in the US, the team ran a highly complex event with over 140 suppliers, 209 custom scenarios, more than 1,000 rules, and 15 documents collected, with Spark AI handling the analysis. When Mohawk introduced eAuctions, it was initially met with skepticism from both internal stakeholders and suppliers. But the outcome surprised everyone, with savings of 40% on a tender where no savings had been expected at all.

Fireside chat: Versuni

Aleksandra Modrak, Head of Indirect Procurement and Procurement Excellence at Versuni, joined Lukas Wawrla for a fireside chat on what it takes to build a procurement function that can scale with complexity.

The conversation touched on how Versuni has approached structuring procurement for both efficiency and strategic value and the role that tooling, data, and team design play in making that possible.

Panel: Scaling freight sourcing

The morning closed with a panel on the real challenges of freight sourcing across complex, global organizations. Graham Parker (Founder & CEO, Ship Angel), Abdelkader Djebablia (Senior Global Category Manager, Logistics & Warehousing, Givaudan), and Sergio Caluori (EUKEM & Global Travel Retail Procurement, Supply Chain & Logistics Director, Estée Lauder) joined Lukas Wawrla for a conversation on what it actually takes to move from reactive to structured freight procurement, and where the wins and friction points are.

Afternoon keynote with Roland Berger

Maxim Przystaw, Partner at Roland Berger, kicked off the afternoon with a keynote on what it will take for procurement professionals to stay relevant in an AI-driven world.

Drawing on Roland Berger's 2026 Procurement Executive Survey, Maxim noted that while complexity and collaboration demands are rising, 33% of procurement effort is still spent on routine tasks and only 17% of organizations have integrated AI broadly. The central argument: the question isn't whether AI will replace procurement teams, but whether organizations will invest in the meta skills that make humans irreplaceable. Roland Berger identified seven, with collaborative skills and digital fluency topping the list for 2030. Only 26% of organizations are confident they can identify the skills they'll need in the future.

Maxim closed with four practical steps: assess your service portfolio, evaluate AI maturity, train for meta skills, and adjust youroperating model.

Keynote by Xeneta: The $4M problem

Bjorn Vang Jensen of Xeneta presented findings from the 2026 Freight Report, based on 450 procurement and supply chain decision-makers at BCO organizations globally.

The headline: disruption cost organizations an average of $4M in 2025, with 27% losing between $5M and $20M. 96% experienced moderate or significant disruption across five forces: supply chain disruption, geopolitical instability, global economic shifts, sustainability and regulatory pressure, and media scrutiny.

The session covered four themes:

• The visibility gap and how to turn it into competitive advantage
• The industry's continued relationship-first bias (56% of organizations, with roughly 66% higher losses than data-driven peers)
• The gap between confidence and reality (most leaders rate their disruption strategies as effective, yet volatility-related spend rose 11% year-on-year)
• Practical steps to close the gap before the next negotiation.
  ‍

Interactive workshops

The afternoon included three parallel workshops, giving attendees space to dig into the topics with Archlet, Ship Angel and Xeneta.

Archlet's session on Rethinking Demand Gathering with Agentic AI. Led by Alina Heimgartner and Marco Krebs, they opened with three questions:

• Where do teams spend the most time during demand gathering today?
• What would they delegate to an AI agent first?
• And what information collected should persist into the awarding phase?

​The discussion fed directly into a preview of what Archlet is building next.

Xeneta hosted a “Tender Season Debrief”, helping teams make sense of the 2026 freight market through a structured review of the year so far.

Ship Angel ran a live workshop on “From Awarded Rate to Booking, Live” where Graham Parker walked through how connecting rate management and execution in one platform addresses one of freight's most persistent inefficiencies.

Panel: Managing volatility & AI in freight sourcing

Sessions ended with a panel, moderated by Michael Blumentsev, that brought together practitioners who have lived the challenge of managing freight in a volatile, technology-shifting environment.

Richard Allison (Director, International Logistics Procurement, Haleon), Michal Silhacek (former Head of Global Land Transportation, IKEA), Urszula Szpak (former Head of Logistics Procurement at ON, and University Lecturer), and Armin Scharlach (Managing Director, TWS Partners) shared their perspectives on how teams are actually adapting and where the real gaps between strategy and execution still lie.

What's next

The Elevate series continues to bring together a growing community of procurement leaders exploring how to design the AI-native procurement organization.

Archlet hosts events all over Europe and the US. To join the conversation and get the opportunity to connect with fellow leaders shaping the future of procurement, explore our upcoming freight sourcing events and beyond here.

‍