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Ryan Petersen

Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Flexport

Search every verified Ryan Petersen interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport, appeared on Bloomberg Television in October 2026 to discuss global freight market conditions. He attributed high airfreight costs across the Pacific partly to fuel surcharges, which he said account for about 40% of the cost, and noted strong demand from data center equipment shipments, citing approximately 30 freighters per day flying from Taiwan to the U.S. with such cargo. He also commented on ocean freight, suggesting that a surge in import volume may be driven by companies using funds from tariff refunds—over $120 billion issued so far—to purchase more inventory, potentially leading to a future glut. At Flexport’s 2026 Fall Technology Release broadcast on September 29, Petersen announced new AI-driven products, including an AI customs classification engine and tools to automate standard operating procedures. He stated that Flexport had audited over $1 billion in merchandise and found an average 20% error rate in competitor customs entries, which he linked to unissued tariff refunds. He also said the company was on pace to automate 21 million tasks annually and that more than 150 Flexport operators were participating in an internal AI accelerator to learn coding and workflow automation. Petersen framed these developments as part of a broader industry shift toward autonomous logistics, comparing the potential impact of AI to the historical effect of the shipping container on trade costs.

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Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“I mentioned airfreight, the big story is data centers. Ocean freight, not a huge story. We have the big surge of volume happening that is hard for people to explain. My personal best explanation is companies got so much money from tariff refunds, over 120 billion dollars issued so far, that companies don't really have other things to do with money other than by more inventory. So you have a big bubble of inventory mo”

“In both air and ocean freight, the price of fuel has been a huge barrier. Airfreight about 40% of the cost to cross the Pacific from the fuel surcharges. It will be interesting to see if that is enough to impact the price because a huge amount of the price is driven by the demand for data centers. We are seeing about 30 freighters per day flying from Taiwan to the United States just with data center equipment. To put”

“We audited more than a billion dollars worth of merchandise and we found a 20% error rate on average across all the competitor entries. This is for IPA, not surprisingly, right? Because it was so volatile. That number matters a lot because it's not a coincidence. This is approximately the same percent of tariff refunds that the government has not issued because they won't issue a refund if you filed the entry wrong t”

“Under the UN law of the sea, no country can impose tolls on an open straight and the sea. You can do it on a canal because they built the canals in Suez and Panama, but they can't do it in the open straight like the straight of Hormuz. If they did so and the US allowed it, it would be very bad precedent for all the other maritime choke points.”

“On the container shipping side of things, it's pretty much you can call it closed. There's like one or two transits a day and it was at peak it was almost 100. So, it's really not like very very little container shipping is happening there. The tankers also way way down although there are more tankers transiting than container ships. I guess more valuable to those economies. It's kind of a from a and my world is cont”

“Look, the way that mining, for example, deals with this, which is really interesting, is they get these companies to sign up what's called take or pay agreements. Right? And so, they can actually smooth out the demand curve 5 or 6 in the future.”

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →