AI fears slammed trucking stocks. Analysts see an obvious buying opportunity.

By William Gavin

C.H. Robinson Worldwide's stock had its biggest one-day drop in years - but the catalyst for the selloff doesn't make much sense to analysts

Freight stocks took a big hit this week on fears that new artificial-intelligence technology could disrupt the industry.

Trucking stocks have fallen victim to Wall Street's fears about widespread artificial-intelligence disruption. That's created a buying opportunity for investors, according to some analysts.

Analysts called out C.H. Robinson's (CHRW) stock, which on Thursday fell 14.6% for its worst one-day performance since October 2019.

"The selloff was a gift," Evercore ISI analysts led by Jonathan Chappell said in a Friday note to investors. The firm added C.H. Robinson to its "tactical outperform" list, calling out the potential for sizable upside to the analysts' $219 price target.

C.H. Robinson's stock is up 7% in midday trading Friday at $179 per share.

On Thursday, AI company Algorhythm Holdings (RIME) said that its SemiCab platform is letting customers "scale freight volumes by 300% to 400%" without hiring more staff. Earlier in the week, the Florida-based company, which formerly sold karaoke products, said its platform was capable of reducing empty freight miles by more than 70% for its customers.

"Historically, logistics has been constrained by human bandwidth," Algorhythm CEO Gary Atkinson said in a statement. "Our SemiCab platform breaks that dependency by embedding intelligence directly into the freight operating system."

The news from Algorhythm kicked off broad-based selling across the trucking industry, impacting shares of RXO (RXO), J.B. Hunt Transport Services (JBHT) and Expeditors International of Washington (EXPD), among others.

The drops showed how AI-fueled selloffs have extended far beyond software stocks.

"We believe yesterday's selloff is overdone and would be buyers" of C.H. Robinson shares, Benchmark analyst Christopher Kuhn said in a Friday investor note, expressing similar confidence in Knight-Swift Transportation (KNX) and Schneider National (SNDR), whose shares also lost ground on Thursday.

Read: The software horror show could get even scarier, according to Citi

Kuhn added that C.H. Robinson has outperformed the freight market for eight straight quarters and has paid out higher dividends consistently over the last 27 years. Meanwhile, Algorhythm Holdings's SemiCab is paying more to service freight than it collects from customers, he added.

C.H Robinson also hit back at the market reaction, saying in a statement on Thursday that it has been a leader in AI for over a decade. It added that AI has helped it automate millions of shipping tasks, lowered costs, saved time and boosted productivity by more than 40%.

In a recent interview with FreightWaves, C.H. Robinson CFO Damon Lee said the company uses 30 agentic AI tools. Lee said that one of those tools has allowed the company to respond to all of the roughly 600,000 rate-quote requests it receives each year at its North American surface-transportation division. Historically, C.H. Robinson could only respond to between 60% and 65% of those requests, he said.

"Rather than being disrupted, our 120-year-old company is the disrupter - and we're just getting started," C.H. Robinson said in the statement.

-William Gavin

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02-13-26 1256ET