3X the Miles, Same Headcount: How Spartan Carrier Group Runs 650 Trucks with AI Agents

We're back! Ava Barnes Davis sits down with Kendrick Dawson, VP of Operations at Spartan Carrier Group. Kendrick led operations at Ryder before joining Spartan and runs dispatch, driver experience, customer reporting and the back office that holds it together. He is also the person who actually set up Spartan's AI workflows. In his own words, "Tech is not my first language by any means." Everything he describes in this episode he set up himself, with support from the Alvys team.Spartan Carrier Group is a $75 million asset carrier running 650 assets across 12 locations in the US, Mexico and Canada. Spartan was one of the first fleets to put Alvys Foundry, an agentic AI platform built inside the TMS, into live operations. This episode is the specifics. What they automated, what it gave back, and what they refuse to hand to a machine.

The results Kendrick reports:

• 3X to 4X more miles driven per year on the same headcount
• Roughly an hour per shift given back on customer reporting alone
• Zero added back-office hires as volume grows

Use case 1:
Automated customer tracking reports Every customer wants a different template on a different cadence. Customer A wants one data set. Customer B wants similar data laid out differently, every 30 minutes instead of every hour. Foundry pulls live ETAs, arrival and departure times, and last known location straight out of Alvys TMS and sends each customer their own format on their own schedule.

Use case 2:
Automatic coverage requests when a driver calls off Spartan's network runs on W-2 company drivers. When one calls off, someone has to cover the route. Foundry watches for any route with no driver assigned inside a four-hour buffer before dispatch. At that mark it fires an email to every carrier in the system that has run a similar route or originated near that pickup. No one has to notice the route that needs coverage, no one has to send the email.

Use case 3:
Detention pay calculated per customer policy Detention terms vary by shipper. One is $50 an hour after two hours. Another is $35 an hour after one hour. There are too many combinations for a team to memorize, and the SOPs live buried in a drawer or a Teams chat. Foundry already has the shippers, the routes and the times, so it applies the right policy and flags what's owed. Kendrick reviews a report at the end of the week. Nobody has to do the math, and drivers don't lose money to a missed calculation.

Use case 4:
Custom references as a translation layer Spartan uses Alvys custom references to make one event mean the right thing to every department. Example: when they have to buy external capacity instead of running internal drivers, field ops describes the reason one way and dispatch describes it another. Finance and the C-suite need to know why unplanned outside capacity is being used. Foundry reads both inputs and resolves them into the answer finance actually understands. The same custom references push route detail, fuel info and daily specifics to the driver app, so drivers get the full picture up front instead of calling in and waiting on hold.

Why inside the TMS instead of bolted on
Kendrick's build-versus-buy take: you can probably bolt an external AI platform onto your TMS. The question is whether you want to hand another company access to your customer rates and your contact list. He describes Foundry as a sandbox. What's in there stays in there, nothing leaks out and no false data comes in. Alvys runs SOC 2 compliant infrastructure and holds enterprise agreements with multiple LLM providers, so customer data stays protected.

What they will not automate
Kendrick is direct about the human element at Spartan never going away. The point of automating the mundane work is to give dispatchers time to actually take care of drivers, think through hard problems and grow into bigger roles. Spartan's driver retention is a competitive advantage and they're not trading it for efficiency.

Chapters

00:00 Meet Kendrick Dawson, VP of Operations at Spartan Carrier Group
00:50 Eight years in freight, from Ryder to Spartan
01:20 What onboarding onto an agentic platform actually looked like
02:35 Quantifying the gain: one dispatcher per shift, 3X to 4X the miles
04:50 Why dispatchers became exception managers
05:55 Driver retention and why the human element stays
07:00 Custom references explained, and what they do on the driver app
09:00 Translating one event for dispatch, finance and HR
12:00 Foundry explained: eight of you cleaning the same house
13:00 Why an agent inside the TMS beats ChatGPT wired to your data
17:20 SOC 2, LLM agreements, and building on a secure foundation
19:00 What this means for a 10-truck fleet with no engineer
21:00 Use case walkthrough: automated customer reports
23:00 Use case: automatic coverage requests on driver call-offs
24:45 Use case: detention pay by customer policy
28:50 Build it yourself, bolt one on, or run it in the TMS
31:00 The support answer: a solution within a week, every time
33:20 Nick Darman, trucking company owner turned TMS founder
35:00 Advice for anyone scared of AI in their operation

Quotes

"I dump my SOPs, I dump my processes in there, I tell it what I want, I prompt it the correct way, and now all of a sudden I scale my operational bandwidth without actually hiring more people."

"I don't think many people go into transportation to say, I cannot wait to go through a hundred PDFs today and make sure the numbers match."

"I have not had any software company or technology provider come into my organization and want to understand how I operate."

About Spartan Carrier Group

Founded 2021 by Carlos Llanes Jr., a combat veteran with four tours, after he left a corporate job. Bootstrapped with no outside capital. Toyota was one of the earliest customers. Headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. Runs an internal W-2 driver network.

About Alvys

Alvys is a modern, AI-first TMS built for carriers and brokers. Native EDI, deep integrations, custom references, and Foundry, an agentic AI platform that runs inside the TMS where your data already lives. Founded by Nick Darman, a former trucking company owner who built Alvys out of frustration with the systems he had to use.

Learn more at alvys.com

Hosted by Ava Barnes Davis. Recorded live in the studio at Spartan Carrier Group in Fort Worth, Texas.