The autonomous trucking race has a new entrant with a distinctly old-school playbook. Bot Auto, fresh off completing its first fully humanless commercial load on a public highway, is betting its next chapter on a freight industry veteran who has spent nearly three decades learning how to build trucking networks.
Brett Suma is joining as president and chief operating officer, bringing with him David Stemm as vice president of commercial operations and Jessica Kane as vice president of commercial finance. The trio founded TrailerHawk.ai together before Wabash acquired it in 2025. They are now reuniting to tackle one of the industry’s most complex operational challenges: turning a technological milestone into a repeatable commercial business.
“We have proven that humanless commercial truckloads are possible, but we understand that technology alone cannot drive value creation,” said Dr. Xiaodi Hou, founder and CEO of Bot Auto. “This industry is complex for good reasons, and building a scalable autonomous freight product requires humility, flexibility, and relentless creativity.”
Suma’s freight education started at age 19, working nights at Knight Transportation to pay for college. From the beginning, trucking had him hooked. From 1999 through the company’s explosive growth period in the early 2000s, he watched the founders build a methodical freight network to feed their growing fleet. It started by identifying corridors with the right freight density, matching them to driver populations, then constructing facilities to support 125 to 150 trucks per market.
“It was very formulaic,” Suma said. “You had to identify a corridor that fit your network that had access to a certain level of inbound and outbound freight to be able to support the driver population that you would need in order to support the actual construction of the facility.”