Peak season approaches, and with it comes the familiar challenge: volumes spike, response times shrink, and operational inefficiencies become impossible to hide. Our October Release continues building on the foundation we laid in July, adding capabilities that help freight forwarders scale their operations without sacrificing control.
The future of freight forwarding isn't choosing between digital tools and human sales teams—both are essential, and different customers or shipments require different solutions. Indeed, as forwarders add automation and self-service capabilities, their sales teams free up time to handle complex shipments and build relationships. But this only works when both channels draw from the same rate foundation.
One source of truth for all your applications
Forwarders need to manage buy rates, internal product rates, and sell rates from a single interface that feeds all their forwarding applications, whether that's cargo.one's quoting tools, their own custom-built platforms via API, or their inside and outside sales teams.
Technology, especially AI, is only as good as the structured data foundation it sits upon. When rates are scattered across spreadsheets, emails, and different systems, reliable automation becomes impossible to build. Manual quotes and automated systems need to draw from the same source of truth. Otherwise, the result is pricing inconsistencies, errors, and a customer experience that breaks down under pressure.
cargo.one's Rate Engine addresses this challenge by centralizing all rate management in one place. When DP World set out to deliver more options and faster service to their customers, they needed exactly this robust data foundation. Robert Frei, their SVP of Freight Forwarding Operations, put it well: "Our collaboration with cargo.one ensures that our quoting tool has access to consistent, high-quality rate information—an essential step in strengthening the customer experience we're building.”
cargo.one can serve as this foundation because we've built the market's most comprehensive rate collection, covering not just air freight rates from 75+ airlines, but also local charges, pre- and post-carriage, and all the rate components needed for complete door-to-door quoting. Our industry-leading data quality, maintained by dedicated teams, means that when forwarders centralize their rate management with us, they're building on a foundation that really performs. Their own rates seamlessly combined with our proprietary database results in one reliable system powering their entire front office.
Enhanced AI that empowers freight forwarders
In July, we introduced AI that extracted shipment details and collected rates. The October Release brings the next step: our AI now generates complete, ready-to-share quotes.
The logistics industry has spent years trying to standardize communication, first through EDI messaging, then through APIs. The reality is, the industry has largely failed to structure data and develop exchange standards. Now large language models change the game entirely. They don't need structured formats to make sense of information. One could imagine a not-too-distant future in which large language models, run by the different players organizing a shipment (shippers, forwarders, airlines, handlers), can communicate among themselves with minimal intervention by human experts.
But how do we generate real impact now, rather than waiting for that future? We've focused on the basics, removing the manual, low-value steps that humans don't want to perform: reading emails, extracting shipment details, collecting rates, and formatting quotes. AI-Powered Quoting handles all this mechanical work, reducing cost-to-quote and allowing freight forwarders to handle more volume without increasing headcount.
Christopher Ziller's team at QCS has been testing the enhanced AI extensively. His feedback on the impact is clear: "cargo.one's AI-powered quoting frees our team for tasks with higher financial value, such as complex shipments that need deeper attention and, more importantly, business development."
This is only possible because the AI is built on cargo.one's comprehensive, high-quality rate data and learns from each freight forwarder's preferences. As Christopher explains, "cargo.one's AI quotes are spot-on—we rarely need to make changes, saving significant time while maintaining control over customer communication." This level of control matters: forwarders review every quote before it goes to the customer. They can edit, adjust, or completely rewrite before sending, or send as-is. The forwarder always makes the final decision.
Control at scale: the complete October Release
The other capabilities in this release all support the same theme: helping forwarders increase volume while maintaining control and visibility.
Tender Feeder turns multi-day rate procurement for RFPs into minutes of work. Forwarders can download all the rate data needed for multi-lane tenders in one export, combining their own rates with cargo.one's proprietary database.
Sales Profiles enable forwarders to set explicit pricing rules per customer or customer group, ensuring pricing strategy is consistently followed across teams, especially important when things get busy and manual review isn't possible for every quote.
Quoting Insights provide real-time analytics on conversion rates, response times, and performance by customer or route. Forwarders don't need to wait until after peak season to see what worked—they can optimize in real time while opportunities are still on the table.
Continuous innovation on a proven foundation
The October Release reflects our philosophy: advanced tools are only as good as the data behind them. By building on our industry-leading rate database and investing heavily in AI automation, cargo.one continues to deliver capabilities no one else can match.
These capabilities are available now. Peak season is arriving. We're ready when you are.
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