This week’s guest is Chad Kennedy, Group Product Manager of the Rate Benchmark platform at DAT Freight & Analytics. Chad has been in the trucking and transportation space for over two decades now as both a carrier and a shipper.  While originally trained in finance, he joined a small family-owned trucking company in the early 2000s.  He moved on to CHEP (the blue pallet people) where he rose to be Director of Transportation. Finally, he joined Chainalytics in 2018 and was part of the acquisition by DAT in 2020. In our conversation, we discuss the different major use cases of rate benchmarking  (past, present, and future) and why that matters in how the rates are created. We also talk about how the shipper-carrier interface has evolved over the years as well as the challenges of managing a data-driven software solution.