Bot Auto has appointed Brett Suma as President and Chief Operating Officer, adding an executive with nearly 30 years of freight industry experience to lead the scaling of its autonomous trucking operations. Suma arrives alongside David Stemm, who becomes Vice President of Commercial Operations, and Jessica Kane, who takes the role of Vice President of Commercial Finance. The appointments follow Bot Auto‘s recent completion of what the company describes as America’s first fully humanless commercial load on a U.S. public highway.
Highlights
- Brett Suma joins as President and COO with nearly 30 years in freight, having begun his career at Knight Transportation before founding Loadsmith and then TrailerHawk.ai.
- TrailerHawk.ai, a trailer technology company, was acquired by Wabash in 2025.
- Two additional executives join with Suma: David Stemm as VP of Commercial Operations and Jessica Kane as VP of Commercial Finance.
- Bot Auto is concentrating its near-term growth in Texas, expanding humanless lanes corridor by corridor.
A Freight Operator Joins the Leadership Bench
Suma built his career from the ground up at Knight Transportation before founding Loadsmith and later TrailerHawk.ai, the trailer technology firm Wabash acquired in 2025. He joins the company with Stemm and Kane, his co-founders, giving Bot Auto an operational leadership group with experience in carrier operations, fleet management, and network design.
The move reflects a bet that operational know-how, not autonomy software alone, will determine which developers turn driverless demonstrations into freight businesses. The trio’s freight backgrounds are positioned to complement an engineering team that has already put driverless trucks on public roads.
“We have proven that humanless commercial truckloads are possible, but we understand that technology alone cannot drive value creation,” said Dr. Xiaodi Hou, Founder and 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.”
From a First Load to a Repeatable Network
Bot Auto frames the hires as a shift from proving the technology to building a business around it. The company had earlier set out its driver-out commercial operations plan on a Houston–San Antonio route, and the leadership additions are meant to convert that groundwork into a repeatable, commercially viable operation.
“The industry is at a crossroads. 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,” said Suma.
Suma also pointed to the 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. Joining Xiaodi and this team felt like the natural next step in everything I’ve been building toward.”
What Comes Next
The hires extend a leadership build-out that earlier included a strategic advisory board drawn from transportation, policy, and finance. Bot Auto, which operates a Transportation-as-a-Service model from its Houston base, says it intends to grow its fleet of autonomous tractors, increase humanless trips, and add humanless lanes across Texas through the year.
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