If you walk into any freight forwarding office in the world, you will see the same thing: screens full of Outlook, Gmail, or specialized email clients. The inbox is the operating system of logistics. But it's also the bottleneck.
The average operations coordinator receives hundreds of emails a day. RFQs, shipment status requests, document filings, exception alerts from carriers—it's a never-ending stream of unstructured data that needs to be read, understood, and typed into a TMS.
The Math of Manual Email Processing
Let's look at the numbers. A typical mid-sized forwarder might have an ops team of 10 people. If each person spends just 3 minutes reading and acting on an email, and they handle 60 actionable emails a day, that is 3 hours per person, per day.
That is 30 hours a day across the team. Or 150 hours a week.
That is essentially 4 full-time employees doing nothing but data entry and email composition. This is the "hidden factory" in your logistics operation—expensive, slow, and prone to error.
Enter AI Agents
The game has changed with the arrival of Large Language Models (LLMs) capable of understanding unstructured text. Unlike old OCR templates that broke if a format changed slightly, modern AI agents read emails like a human does.
Use Case 1: Automated RFQ Entry
Instead of a human copy-pasting origin, destination, weight, and volume from a PDF into a spreadsheet, an AI agent can do it instantly.
RFQ Workflow
The AI parses the messy email body, identifies the key shipment details, and pushes them directly into your quoting tool or TMS via API. Your team just reviews the final output.
Use Case 2: Proactive Status Updates
Customers email "Where is my cargo?" because they don't trust the portal or it's out of date. An AI agent can:
- Monitor the "Where is my cargo" intent in incoming emails.
- Check the live milestone in your TMS.
- Draft a polite, accurate email response to the customer.
- Place it in "Drafts" for a human to click "Send".
Use Case 3: Exception Management
When a carrier sends an email about a rolled shipment or a delay, it often sits in an inbox until someone spots it. An AI agent can parse carrier alerts 24/7 and immediately flag the specific shipment ID in your system, triggering a notification to the account manager.
The Result: Humans in the Loop, Not the Weeds
The goal isn't to replace the operations team. It's to free them. When you remove the 3 hours of data entry, your staff can focus on negotiation, complex problem solving, and actually talking to customers.
Freight forwarding is a relationship business. But you can't build relationships if you are buried in Outlook.
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