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cargo.one's Barcelona event brought together forwarders, carriers, and technology partners to exchange ideas and advice, and to explore why the forwarders now moving with AI are pulling ahead.
A company of 100 people using the right AI can have the same capability as a global team of 1000. Sebastian Cazajus, VP Ocean at cargo.one, put that idea to a packed room of freight forwarders in Barcelona last week, and it set the tone for the evening. An industry panel, including Pilar Montagudo of Lufthansa Cargo and Pablo Cruz, CEO of the TMS VisualTrans, examined how AI is carrying more labor-intensive, routine work, and freeing forwarding teams to apply their judgment and build value. It soon became clear that the forwarders moving today are already pulling ahead with their results.
AI in daily workflows
AI is already hard at work for both carrier and forwarder teams. Pilar Montagudo, who leads Digital Sales for Spain and Portugal at Lufthansa Cargo, described how the airline now processes complex booking requests with many dimensions in a fully automated way: "It's freed us from a huge amount of work and effort when putting those bookings together," she said. "It's sped up response times a lot, and ultimately the team members are very happy", she added. For Lufthansa, competitiveness today comes down to agility, speed, and ease of response for bookings around the clock: "It's not so much about having the capacity, but about managing it and having the agility to sell it."
Pablo Cruz pointed to the acceleration that available data now delivers every business: "Finding the data is no longer the challenge. The challenge is interpreting it and making the decision as quickly as possible." Pablo highlighted great gains possible when professionals realize that AI can do much of the heaviest lifting. For example, at VisualTrans, bank reconciliation that "used to take two people two or three hours every morning" is now completed by AI each morning, with a dashboard flagging only what needs the team's attention.
Ocean freight operates with huge complexity, often manifested in 45-page Excel files and PDFs. Sebastian Cazajus underlined how expectations around speed and accuracy are changing fast: "We're all used to getting information in real time". The last five years brought a big wave of digitalization, online rates and dynamic pricing. The next wave, Sebastian advised, is direct MCP connections that enable customers to harness AI in ocean forwarding: “Customers are asking us to enable AI so they can directly run a query like ‘give me this price, give me the tracking for this container’ and then feed those answers straight into their workflows”. The shift from simple web platforms toward AI-native connections like cargo.one’s is now well underway.
Pablo Cruz added the important point that the more scattered a forwarder's data is across rate repositories, shipment records and accounting, "the worse it is, from an IT perspective”. With the right API and MCP connectivity, robust and consistent data can be used in every process.
The value of AI quoting
The panelists agreed that quoting is the clearest near-term opportunity for impactful AI: many forwarders in the room produce between 2,000 and 5,000 quotes a month, each taking 15 to 45 minutes by hand. Sebastian Cazajus admits, "Nobody in this industry got into it to copy the order from the email, figure out the origin, figure out the destination, move it to another system, search and filter for the cheapest, the fastest". The compilation stage can now be fully automated to create an intelligent, complete draft quote for review by the forwarder. Autonomy is decided "as you gain trust on certain trade lanes, certain customers."
The remaining work is the expert side of forwarding that adds most value: "Negotiating with the carrier, building the relationship with the customer, finding that exception that's always going to happen in this industry", adds Sebastian. In fact, in terms of quote accuracy, four-out-of-five AI-generated quotes on cargo.one are now being sent with no human editing needed at all.
Without doubt, the foundation of successful AI is the unique, precise data required. A generic AI model can only offer general cost information for a shipment but it will not deliver a bookable price. The context or ‘commercial intelligence’ that a forwarder carries in their head, the shipment they have handled 200 times for that client, "is actually the most important thing in the end", and must be captured for AI to succeed, stated Pablo. The potential around smart quoting at scale is huge. Pablo provided the useful analogy of "five euros of process cost today done by a human hand, versus one euro of cost with AI."
3LG Logistics: ready to move fast
The desire for an acceleration with technology was shared in a fireside chat with Arturo Chávez, co-founder and Business Development Manager at 3LG Logistics, and Lorena Herlein from its Inside Sales team. Before cargo.one, Lorena explained the team went into each carrier's website by hand for destinations where it did not have its own negotiated rates: "That took up a lot of our time, we couldn't give customers a fast response."
By adopting cargo.one for its quoting, 3LG can better leverage the increasingly dynamic pricing and be rewarded for faster response times. As an agent-focused forwarder serving partners across every time zone, 3LG "can't afford the luxury of only working the 8 or 9 hours we have here in Spain," when requests arrive day and night.
Using cargo.one means the 3LG team can now answer quote requests with a broader range of contract and market options, all visible in one tool: "We don't quote blind, which is something that used to happen to us”, admitted Lorena. Now in peak season, Arturo confirmed that “cargo.one is taking a huge amount of work off our plate, because quotes are genuinely being handled extremely fast."
The next step in 3LG’s sights is applying AI to their workflows to automate the sending of quotes and commercial follow-up. The 3LG team arrives to work each day “to find thirty, fifty, a hundred emails" from partners across networks, such as WCA, requesting prices as soon as possible. Arturo and Lorena shared excitement that their rate and cost data foundation on cargo.one can now train AI quoting workers to prepare a complete quote in under one minute, versus around 45 minutes of manual work today.
Forwarders are moving ahead
The panelists concluded that AI adoption is now well underway, with forwarders at the forefront learning fast how to combine the power of AI workflows with “the talent and the knowledge that exists in each of these companies," Pilar Montagudo urged all forwarders to take the opportunity, and advised: "Adapt or get left behind."
Sebastian Cazajus shared the high level of quote reliability that cargo.one’s customers are receiving from AI: "There's now much more trust in that data mapping, which is fundamental." He left attendees with several key reasons why the moment has arrived for them to drive ahead with AI – firstly, AI model quality has improved enormously, secondly, carrier connectivity in both ocean and air has expanded in recent years, and lastly, every forwarder will soon be competing with widespread AI usage and will need to keep pace. AI workers mean that even while you sleep or eat, the quotes can always go out.
To explore how cargo.one's AI workers can supercharge your forwarding operation, get in touch.
