2025 was another eventful year in the trucking industry, and we were proud to help carriers, drivers, and brokers navigate the uncertain waters and achieve their goals. We built new tools, observed surprising data trends, tackled new regulations and challenges, and launched new events – with so much happening, you may have missed some of our biggest moments. Read on to see the wrap-up of new ways to make the most of our system so you can prepare for a great 2026.
Artificial Intelligence: More Powerful & More Nuanced
This was our second year of developing AI-powered tools designed to make your work easier and faster, and a clear theme emerged: thoughtful creations that enhance human employees but never replace the intuition and decision-making that carriers rely on from their best staff members.
Have you checked out our intentional AI features in these service areas?
Recruiting
Getting driver applications is just half the battle – once you have applicants to review, identifying the best candidates is key to ensuring a quality driver doesn’t slip through your fingers and go to another carrier. Turning on Fit Score lets you use a color-coded scale to identify which candidates to prioritize based on fit (most qualified as determined by accidents, violations, and experience). Interest Score uses AI to tell how engaged a candidate is based on interaction history, providing a strong indicator of whether that driver is likely to take a job with your company.
Once you’ve identified your best candidates, Call Me Now streamlines the call initiation process between driver and recruiter and automatically records your calls, generating an AI transcript after the fact and extracting key information from the conversation to automate workflows, keeping your best conversations documented.
Safety and Compliance
We’ve found time-saving ways to bring the efficiency of AI into the safety space. Compliance decisions will always need a human at the helm to lend their expertise, but you can make that job more manageable by having AI help identify the situations and documents that most need human attention.
With DQF Readiness, carriers can streamline the transition from recruiting to safety to help recruiters ensure driver files are complete and error-free before drivers hit the road. Then, once a driver is hired, our DQF Review Tool helps track and review DQF items from Safety Management, flagging which don’t meet minimum requirements or what hasn’t been reviewed. AI suggestions identify missing, expired, or otherwise noncompliant documents, letting safety personnel review these files, then run processes from the same view to update these documents.
Two New Acquisitions Enhance Tenstreet's Offerings
Tenstreet acquired two new companies as part of our ongoing commitment to add to the value we deliver to clients every year and expand our offerings.
In February, we brought TextLocate, the leading provider of driver communications for third-party logistic providers, into the fold. The company’s experience with freight visibility features let us incorporate its trifecta of chat, image capture, and location services to improve driver visibility and address urgent issues of fraud and cargo theft.
The acquisition has already improved connections across the supply chain and will continue to bolster Tenstreet’s line of driver-centric efficiency and logistics tools by leveraging the Driver Pulse app and joining forces with both TruckMap and True Load Time. Drivers and brokers are already experiencing time-saving automations, improved transparency, and decreased friction on both sides of the network.
The Best Driver-Finding Experience We've Ever Offered
Helping carriers recruit drivers has always been our bread and butter, so we’ve introduced several new enhancements to the marketing and recruiting process to keep your application pipeline full and running more efficiently than ever before.
Starting off, we’ve enhanced our IntelliApp Pre-Population feature so that drivers are now prompted to update their stored IntelliApp based on data we find and changes made by other carriers, accepting or declining updates as they come. IntelliApps you receive are even more accurate as a result, saving time fact-checking.
Once drivers see your job postings, those up-to-date applications can hit your inbox faster if you’re using One-Tap Apply. Ask your drivers to share their most recent profile with a single tap and get that info instantly, getting a quick sense of a driver’s qualifications without the back-and-forth.
Not seeing enough qualified drivers applying? Pulse Jobs Filtering increases job post visibility and attracts more relevant candidates with expanded filter options based on skills, experience, and needs. New Pulse Match offerings deliver the highest form of exact matches in Pulse Super Match, matching on preferences in addition to requirements.
Once a driver hits the apply button, make sure you keep them engaged with Conditional Structured Messages that send custom, automatic responses based on application data.
Everything is Always Changing...
The transportation industry is ever-changing, throwing new curveballs at new and seasoned carriers alike. This year saw tariff concerns, a smattering of executive orders, and shifting regulations
We’re no strangers to uncertainty, so Tenstreet stepped in to help you respond to the shifting landscape.
Our new English Language Proficiency Practice course helped carriers respond to the change in regulation enforcement around CFR 391.11(b)(2), offering carriers a free practice module they could assign to drivers to assess their English proficiency, better identifying which of a carrier’s employees might be at risk.
We also added the option to charge for Xchange verifications as an acknowledgement of the direction the industry is moving – we’ll always believe that speeding up employment verifications is a resource best kept free, but we understand that every carrier is different and needs to make the best decisions possible around its hiring processes.
This year marked our first Private Fleet Summit, which brought private fleet professionals together to facilitate discussions of industry best practices within companies where transportation supports, but doesn’t define, the overall business. As we’ve worked with more and more private fleets over the years, we recognized that their unique challenges required an additional avenue to optimize learnings, and this won’t be our last foray into providing different types of businesses with unique opportunities for growth.
Going into 2026, we’re already building tools to combat the next wave of challenges carriers face. The best way to get your hands on them is to register for UConnect26, where attendees get free 90-day access to our latest releases before everyone else.
…But the Fundamentals of Success Stay The Same
Staying on top of the latest news is important, but forgetting to step back and take in the big picture can keep you from seeing the evergreen strategies. Here’s a few things we saw prove out time and again this year.
Responding quickly to drivers matters.
Response time remains one of the strongest indicators of whether you’ll hire a driver, with leads you contact within 5 minutes of a submitted application being several times more likely to hire on than those you let wait even just 30 minutes. Drivers are still in the position to choose the best possible job offer among competing companies, so catching their attention before they drift to another carrier’s posting is the best possible way to keep them on the hook. Countless tools like PulseBot, Structured Messaging, and Call Me Now help you make contact faster, but the core principle of touching base quickly remains the same.
Investing in retention saves money on recruiting.
The cheapest price you can pay for advertising to recruit a driver is nothing. Keeping your existing drivers longer means you’re not spending money marketing to, recruiting, and onboarding new people, and you’ll often have more loyal and consistent drivers as a result. We’ve long offered solutions to help you collect your drivers’ opinions and better address concerns, so if you haven’t checked out Insights or Rewards, now is a great time to get started (and try Bulk Rewards to award points to several drivers at once, a major time-saver). The most important thing: making drivers feel heard and appreciated, a strategy that will always be in style.
An ounce of compliance awareness is worth a pound of litigation.
Complicated audits and nuclear verdicts can threaten your company’s efficiency or put you out of business entirely, so having effective safety processes can prepare you for whatever is coming. We’ve added several features to our extensive command center of safety tools and integrations this year, including tracking on equipment-related documents, an electronic permit book to store permits and other documents, post-hire checklists for events, and more.
Automation makes time for MORE human activity, not less.
We feel the same way about automation as we do about AI: it saves time on the mundane so you and your team can spend more energy on the important human things. Having quality conversations with drivers, catching safety issues that could cause your company harm, and thinking about the big questions around how you want your business to grow are better uses of your time than identifying gaps and inconsistencies in applications, responding to carriers with a good track record, and answering driver questions about policies and procedures (all things we’ve built automations for this year).
When in Doubt, Take Care of Drivers
At the end of the day, drivers are the lifeblood of what keeps the transportation industry moving. We developed several new tools specifically for drivers this year to make their lives easier:
Detention Tracking Tool – Drivers can use the Pulse App to track detention time based on their location. These records can be shared with you, helping you negotiate with customers who detain drivers for long periods and pass that money on to drivers.
Fuel Stop Preferences – Drivers can set their preferred chain of fueling station and can toggle on the ability to see only their preferred chain on TruckMap routes.
Interactive DQF in Pulse – Drivers now have an interactive view of their DQ File in the Pulse app and can review shared documents, see whether anything is missing or expired, and share a new document in just a few taps.
Pulse Community – A one-stop shop for Pulse users to quickly access transportation-related resources, including a Highway Angel nomination form, Truckers Against Trafficking contact information, and a Predatory Towing prevention form.
Beside You In 2026 and Beyond
We were honored to spend another year serving our clients and the industry in 2025. Let us know if there’s any way we can support you that wasn’t covered here and we’ll see you in 2026!
