Hitrak / Johnny Davison.
Every freight operator has heard the AI pitch by now. Bolt a smart layer onto your existing systems, and the promise is dashboards that write themselves, exceptions that resolve on their own, customers who never have to ask where their freight is. In practice, most of it quietly fails to deliver.
The reason isn’t the AI. It’s what it’s being asked to read. Most transport management systems were built to be systems of record — they document what already happened so a job can be invoiced. Feed an AI model into a system like that and it’s reasoning over gaps: partial data, paper trails, manual re-entry, information that arrives too late to be useful. Real AI needs real data, and most freight operations don’t have it — not because they lack ambition, but because their foundational system was never designed to capture it in the first place.
Hitrak, the Auckland-founded transport operating system now expanding into Australia, was built on the opposite premise: data-first, not AI-first. Capture the data as the operation happens, then build the intelligence on top of it. Rather than a system that records a freight movement after the fact, Hitrak is built to run the movement itself, from booking through to delivery, generating a live, structured record of every step along the way. Founder and CEO Johnny Davison calls it a digital twin of the operation — not a report on what happened, but a real-time model of what’s happening right now.
The difference shows up fastest in the numbers. New Zealand carrier MD Freighting moved from capturing around 12 data points per consignment to more than 150, in some cases up to 300, after switching to Hitrak. That density of data has translated directly into results: a 58 per cent reduction in weekly administration time and a 65.1 per cent fall in operational expenditure, freeing staff who once spent their week chasing proof-of-delivery paperwork to focus on the freight itself. Hitrak now processes around 7,500 shipments a day for operators including Big Chill, Trengrove Transport, Hamilton Foods, ZAR Logistics, Apparel Lines, Value Tyres, Freightways and Symons Group across New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific, backed by 99.95 per cent platform uptime.
It’s a story Prime Mover explores in more depth this month, tracing Davison’s path from guiding expeditions on Everest to building freight software, and the surprising overlap between planning a mountain ascent and planning a freight network, where the cost of missing information is measured in stranded trucks rather than stranded climbers.
For operators weighing up their next transport management system, the question worth asking isn’t which AI features are on the roadmap. It’s whether the data underneath is real enough to make any of them actually work.
Hitrak will be exhibiting at MegaTrans 2026, 16–17 September at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre — stand G04. Drop by to see the platform in action, or book a demo or a meeting in advance here.
