HOUSTON, Texas — Bot Auto is welcoming Brett Suma as president and COO.
“The hire is a direct statement of intent: the next chapter of autonomous trucking won’t be won by technology alone, it will be won by operators who know how to scale it,” Bot Auto said.
Suma brings nearly 30 years of freight industry experience, having built his career from the ground up at Knight Transportation before founding Loadsmith and then TrailerHawk.ai, a trailer technology company acquired by Wabash in 2025.
He joins Bot Auto alongside his co-founders, David Stemm, who will become vice president of commercial operations, and Jessica Kane, who takes the role of vice president of commercial finance.
“We have proven that humanless commercial truckloads are possible, but we understand that technology alone cannot drive value creation,” said Dr. Xiaodi Hou, founder, CEO of Bot Auto. “This industry is complex for good reasons, and building a scalable autonomous freight product requires humility, flexibility and relentless creativity. That is the challenge I am most excited about. Brett, David, and Jessica understand freight at the operating level, and they give Bot Auto the practical leadership we need to turn a first-of-its-kind milestone into a real commercial network.”
According to Bot Auto, the trio give Bot Auto an operational leadership bench with deep roots in carrier operations, fleet management and network design.
Fully Humanless Operations
According to Bot Auto, the team expansion arrives at a pivotal moment. The company has already cleared the bar that has stalled competitors, delivering a fully humanless commercial load, not in a controlled environment, but on a live U.S. interstate highway. The challenge ahead is turning that milestone into a repeatable, commercially viable business, a challenge that requires precisely the kind of freight expertise Suma, Stemm and Kane bring.
“The industry is at a crossroads,” Suma said. “While others are still testing, Bot Auto has already proven that humanless commercial freight is a reality. My job now is to build the operational backbone that makes it scale; the right corridors, the right economics, the right network architecture. Texas is the ideal starting point, and we’re thinking corridor by corridor until we’ve built something the traditional trucking model simply can’t compete with.”
Believing in the Misson
Suma is also candid about the personal conviction behind the move.
“I believe in the mission, and I believe in what this technology means for the people in trucking, not just the business case,” Suma said. “Joining Xiaodi and this team felt like the natural next step in everything I’ve been building toward.”
According to Bot Auto, with a federal regulatory environment increasingly favorable to autonomous vehicles and growing shipper demand for capacity certainty, Bot Auto’s combination of proven humanless technology and seasoned freight operations puts it in a category of one.
“The company is now fully positioned to hit more milestones this year, growing its fleet of fully autonomous tractors, increasing fully humanless trips, expanding fully humanless lanes and expanding its network across Texas,” Bot Auto said.
Dana Guthrie is an award-winning journalist who has been featured in multiple newspapers, books and magazines across the globe. She is currently based in the Atlanta, Georgia, area.
