Multimodal 2026 was busy. What stood out was not the volume of people but who they were: a strong showing of early stage start-ups and emerging companies openly challenging the established leaders in freight, customs and warehouse management.
AI dominated the conversation, as it does everywhere. But the tone was different from other sectors. There is still real uncertainty about how much of an impact it will actually have on freight and customs, and most people we spoke to were honest about not yet knowing how it works or what it changes for them.
A member of the Altura Partners team spent time on the floor. What follows is what we heard.
The hiring is happening, but not where you would expect
The companies making hires are start-ups and privately owned, smaller organisations pushing into new regions. Larger scale companies are hiring less, and in several cases are running layoffs instead.
That is worth sitting with. If your view of the market comes from watching the biggest names, you would conclude that supply chain hiring has stalled. It has not. It has moved.
Within the sector, customs and warehouse management systems are seeing the most movement.
The hardest thing to find is talent that sticks
The recurring complaint was not a shortage of applicants. It was retention.
Companies described leaning on their own networks and finding that it does not reliably work, or asking internal recruitment teams to cover multiple roles at once and watching quality suffer as a result. Teams stretched across too many searches do not generate enough strong profiles, and the roles stay open.
On the roles themselves, presales and technical hiring is clearly increasing.
Tenure and the return to the office
Two things companies have stopped compromising on.
The first is location. More businesses are moving away from remote roles and towards hybrid working, specifically to rebuild culture and cross-team collaboration. This has changed noticeably in the last year.
The second is tenure. Companies want people who will stay, and a track record of staying now carries real weight in a shortlist.
These two together explain much of the difficulty. The single biggest hiring headache described to us was finding people willing to travel into the office. Narrow the geography and lengthen the tenure requirement, and the available pool gets small quickly.
AI is splitting the sector
The companies in the warehouse management space are leaning into AI noticeably more than the logistics providers are.
That gap matters for hiring. Businesses moving faster on AI need different profiles, particularly in presales and technical roles, and they are competing for them against a market that has not yet decided how seriously to take any of it.
What is actually slowing hiring down
Very little of it is candidate supply.
Companies told us that finding the right profile takes longer than it used to, and that internal process is often the reason. Roles have to go through the talent team first, or be advertised for a set period before an external agency can be engaged. By the time the search genuinely starts, the strongest people have moved.
Alongside that, many businesses are attempting the sourcing themselves without the resources to do it properly, then spending months trying to find a perfect profile they were never set up to reach.
What to get right in the next six to twelve months
Two things, from the conversations we had. Download the full report to find out.