Bot Auto names freight veteran Brett Suma as president and COO

Bot Auto, which recently completed its first fully autonomous commercial load on a public highway, has appointed Brett Suma as president and chief operating officer to build out its commercial operations. Suma is bringing David Stemm as vice president of commercial operations and Jessica Kane as vice president of commercial finance. The three previously founded TrailerHawk.ai together before Wabash acquired it in 2025. Suma spent nearly three decades in trucking operations, starting at age 19 working nights at Knight Transportation while paying for college. Through the 1990s and 2000s, he learned how major carriers build scalable freight networks by identifying high-density corridors, matching them to driver populations, then constructing facilities to support 125 to 150 trucks per market. The autonomous angle changes the equation significantly. While traditional trucking operations must account for driver availability and support when expanding into new markets, Bot Auto can focus purely on freight economics and infrastructure investment without the driver population constraint. Suma acknowledged the competitive challenge facing the industry: most autonomous trucking startups are simply adding self-driving tractors to existing networks, an approach he argues does not make financial sense. For trucking fleets and owner-operators, Bot Auto's move signals that autonomous carriers will compete on operational efficiency rather than driver availability. This could reshape how freight networks expand and where capacity gets deployed over the next five to ten years, according to FreightWaves.