Your People Weren’t Hired to Push Screens

Walk the floor of almost any freight operation and you’ll see something strange: skilled, experienced professionals spending their day copying numbers from one system into another. Checking a rate in one tab, re-keying it in a second, reconciling a mismatch in a third. We hired these people for their judgment. Instead, we’ve turned them into human middleware.

In a recent piece, EKA Solutions CEO JJ Singh makes a sharp argument about why this happens—and why the fix isn’t what most people assume. The problem, he says, isn’t that your team lacks talent. It’s that the systems around them were never designed to let that talent breathe.

The trap of “screen pushing”

Disconnected software forces workers to become the connective tissue between tools that don’t talk to each other. Every handoff between platforms is a place where context gets lost and errors creep in. Poor data quality then piles on a second tax: endless reconciliation. The result is that attention—the scarcest resource in any business—gets drained by drudgery instead of spent on customers, exceptions, and strategy.

Why bolting on AI doesn’t save you

Here’s the part that should give every operator pause. Singh points to hard numbers on the limits of AI-as-a-shortcut. Gartner projects that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be scrapped by the end of 2027. An MIT study found that 95% of enterprise AI pilots returned nothing measurable.

The reason is blunt: AI built on dirty, disconnected data just produces bad answers faster. Automation doesn’t fix a broken foundation—it accelerates it. Clean, connected data has to come first, or the whole investment collapses into an expensive experiment.

From alerts to real decisions

So what does the right path look like? Singh lays out a progression worth thinking about. First, alerts—systems that surface the exceptions actually worth a human’s attention. Then recommendations—AI that proposes the smart response rather than leaving people to hunt for it. Finally execution—semiautonomous agents that handle the routine, while people step in on the genuinely complex calls.

Notice what this does to a job. The drudgery moves to software. The judgment stays with the person. Nobody gets replaced; they get their time back. Singh calls the real prize “concentration”—the mental space to think strategically instead of firefighting spreadsheets. In a commoditized industry, that focus may be the last durable competitive advantage.

The takeaway

Technology’s job isn’t to give workers more screens to babysit. It’s to hand decision-making authority back to the people best equipped to use it—turning administrative processors back into problem-solvers who actually move the business forward.

It’s a reframe that applies well beyond freight, and Singh makes the case with more depth, data, and industry context than a summary can capture.

Read the full article on the EKA website: Stop Pushing Screens—Empower People to Solve Problems & Make Decisions