The forwarder who comes back first, at the right price and with the right service, wins the quote. That won't change, but what is changing are customer expectations.
Every step of the work still matters: reading the request, chasing the missing detail, collecting rates across carriers, building the quote, placing the booking, updating the TMS. Your team's expertise is needed in every part of it, though most of the hours go into work that the customer never sees.
Four in five of the AI-built quotes on cargo.one go out without a person touching them, on rates and rules the team has set themselves. That’s how a response goes back to customers in minutes. On a recent call, a UK forwarder told me about a booking his team won overnight. The request had arrived at half past eleven the night before, the worker quoted it, the customer accepted at seven, and his team started the day with the booking in the TMS.
From inbox to quote in under a minute
AI quoting is software doing the steps of the job, in your systems and on your rates, exactly how you would do it yourself.
The request arrives as an email, often a forwarded thread with the detail buried in the middle of it. The AI worker reads it, recognises it as a quote request and pulls out the lane, the dates, the weight and the dimensions. It queries the carriers, builds the quote against your rates, your customer profiles and your margin rules, sends it, then writes the result back into the TMS so the record is right without anyone typing it twice.
You set the rules
The key here is that you are in control and you decide how far the AI can go. It can prepare everything for your approval with a human verification on every quote, or you can let it respond autonomously within a defined scope that your team has set, while everything unusual routes to a person. Most teams move along that line as the accuracy proves itself, and they decide when.
Any quote can be adjusted or overwritten on the platform, by anyone with the right permissions, before it goes to the customer.
Customising the agent is part of the setup, and so is proving it. Every quote the worker builds shows the rate it picked and the rule that picked it, so you can sit with our product team and rebuild quotes yourself, comparing line by line. On one of those sessions, an Air Freight Team Leader walked us through the quotes his team had created and exactly how they had been built.
The interesting learning was that two of the margin rules were set tighter than the rates actually used in practice so we updated them, and after that the quotes matched the pricing much more accurately. Oskar Salmhofer, Senior Product Manager, recently wrote up the six patterns behind how a team learns to trust a quote it did not build.
The hours saved don’t go to waste, they go into calling the customer before they chase you, sorting the shipment that went wrong, being the person who already knows the account and where to go next. This higher level of personalised, proactive service seems to have also become an expectation instead of a ‘nice to have’ in recent months.
Live now
Your customers keep raising the bar when it comes to speed and service, so whichever technology partner you decide to work with needs to keep moving with the times so you don’t get left behind. Here are a few highlights of the products we’ve shipped in the last six months:
- Multimodal quoting, with air and ocean in one workflow.
- New direct LCL carrier connections.
- Quotes and bookings that sync to the TMS on every update.
- AI workers that scan the inbox, identify quote requests, procure rates and place bookings.
Up and running faster than you'd expect
Most forwarders I speak to expect a move like this to take up to a year but AI is accelerating deployment times as well. If you send us your local charges and a run down of your quoting process, preferred carriers and margin rules we’ll be ready to kick off within 24 hours. Better yet, if you’re an existing customer, and we already have your rates, we’ll be faster still.
What counts as fast and what counts as good will keep changing and the bar will keep getting higher; it always has and it always will. The technology provider you decide to partner with therefore needs to keep pace with these ever increasing expectations Every freight forwarder has a booking platform. The ones pulling ahead have a partner still building.
My name is George and I spend my time talking to Freight Forwarders about Quoting and AI. If you’d like to explore how this could work for you or if you just want to pick my brains, just get in touch.
