Flexport CEO Ryan Peterson on AI product launches, de minimis chaos, and why he won't buy warehouse robots yet

Summary

Ryan Petersen is using Flexport's scale — offices in 15 countries, shipments to 47 last year — to pitch a full end-to-end logistics stack that handles everything from factory floor to retail shelf, including inventory financing through Flexport Capital. The goal, in his framing, is for logistics to work like a light switch: automatic, cheap, and invisible enough that brands can focus entirely on their products.

The AI product drop

Flexport launched roughly 20 AI products in a single release this week, covering six months of development. Petersen says the cadence is deliberate — a physics principle he cites: maximum energy transfer happens when something very hot meets something very cold. The logic is that incremental launches get ignored, while a concentrated drop creates buzz. He says the batch deadline also functioned as a forcing mechanism, with some products shipped over the final weekend before launch. He's calling this the company's new rhythm going forward, with biannual drops.

De minimis chaos and a revenue doubling

The more immediate story is in fulfillment. Petersen says Flexport doubled revenue in its fulfillment business unit — acquired from Shopify Logistics — in just the first two months of 2025. The catalyst was chaotic: Mexico shut down its duty-free cross-border fulfillment program for US-bound goods on December 19, catching the market off guard. Petersen notes roughly 30% of large Shopify merchants were using that Mexico-based program to ship goods under the $800 de minimis threshold into the US without duties. When it closed, those brands needed alternative fulfillment fast.

Mexico nominally brought the program back, but hasn't issued importer licenses, so it's functionally still shut. Meanwhile, Trump's de minimis executive order targeting Chinese-origin goods added another layer of uncertainty — suspended in week two but widely expected to return. Petersen's read is that brands hoping Vietnam or other countries provide a tariff safe haven may be wrong: he predicts, without claiming inside information, that the administration will eventually extend tariffs beyond China.

Flexport's leadership team, including Petersen himself, was on-site at the San Bernardino warehouse last weekend dealing with the surge. The operational problem is blunt: inventory pulled from Tijuana fulfillment centers arrived improperly labeled, creating an inbound processing crunch.

Robots: wait and see

On warehouse automation and humanoids, Petersen is deliberately holding back capital. He argues that deploying a large automated fulfillment system today, which would carry a 10-to-15-year asset life, is a poor bet given how fast humanoid robotics is advancing. The risk isn't that robots won't work — it's that a major CapEx commitment now could be obsolete in three years. He's staying manual on pick-pack operations for now, with digital tracking and scan-in/scan-out for accountability.

His skepticism about humanoids more broadly centers on the benchmark they need to clear: human workers are dexterous, reasonably smart, and not that expensive. He doesn't dismiss the technology, but he's waiting to see whether it clears that bar before writing checks.

On the port automation dispute, Petersen calls the proposed ban on port robotics "pretty ridiculous" and a direct competitive disadvantage for the US. He frames the union-operator dynamic as a non-proliferation standoff where both sides benefit from a no-automation agreement, while consumers and shippers absorb the cost through higher prices.

The footprint gap

Flexport currently operates in 15 countries and is targeting five more within 12 months. The complexity of retail expansion — custom labeling, Nordstrom-specific hang tags, pallet compliance requirements with financial chargebacks for errors — explains why scaling retail channel access isn't just a technology problem. Each retailer onboarding is its own operational project.

NPS for the freight forwarding business hit 72 last month, which Petersen flags as evidence the service model is working. The fulfillment acquisition is still catching up, but he says the feedback loop between customers and the tech team has tightened materially over the past nine months.