A forwarder loses money in the quietest way there is. A client in another time zone writes at eleven at night asking what it costs to bring a container from Shanghai to Dubai, door to door. The message sits in a WhatsApp thread until morning. By then the client has collected three prices from other companies and picked one of them. Nothing broke, nobody made a mistake, and the shipment is gone.
Freight is a business of repeated questions: how much, where is it now, which documents do you need, when does it clear customs. Below is what AI agents can take over in a carrier, forwarder or car import company, what has to stay with people, and how to check all of it on your own enquiries before you pay anything.
What AI actually does in a freight company
Most of what reaches a freight desk is not negotiation. It is the same handful of questions in different words: a rate request, a status question, a document request, a worried message about a delay. An AI agent is software that reads such a message in plain language, finds the answer in your own data and carries the conversation to a result: a price, a status, a request waiting in your list of deals.
That is also where it differs from the automation logistics companies already run. A script moves a file from one system to another and stops the moment the file looks different; an agent handles the open text of a client who writes «need a price for two pallets, fragile, by Friday, Kuala Lumpur». The two are not rivals: agents and RPA cover different halves of the same job.
The price while the client is still in chat
A door-to-door quote is the part owners worry about most, and rightly so. A wrong number sent at night is worse than no answer at all. So the agent does not estimate. It takes rates, surcharges and formulas from your own tariffs and calculates the figure in code, not in its head, the same way your manager would with a calculator and your rate sheet.
When the data for that lane is missing, it does not improvise. It says what it can, collects the details that matter for a quote, cargo, weight, volume, pick-up and delivery points, dates and special handling, and hands the enquiry to a manager with a short summary. The client gets a human answer in the morning instead of silence, and the manager starts from a filled-in request rather than from «hi, how much?».
Time zones stop mattering here. The agents reply at any hour, and the system speaks seven interface languages, so a buyer writing in Chinese and a shipper writing in Russian both get an answer in their own language from the same rate sheet.
Where is my cargo: status questions
Status questions are the heaviest load on a cargo support desk, and the least valuable work in it. The answer always exists somewhere already: in your tracking, in a spreadsheet, in an export from your system. The agent reads status from that data and answers the client, with the same wording and the same level of detail every time.
Two honest limits are worth naming. Shipment status comes from the data you give: a sheet or an export is enough to start. A direct live link into your own tracking platform is a separate project, planned separately, not something that appears by itself on day one. And when a milestone is unclear or the data is stale, the agent says so and passes the question to a person, rather than inventing a reassuring date.
Documents, the part that eats the evening
Every shipment drags a pack behind it: invoice, packing list, bill of lading, certificates, customs paperwork, and the long correspondence of asking the client for a missing scan. A documents agent keeps that list, knows which papers this route and this cargo need, asks the client for what is missing and chases the reply until the pack is complete.
The manager then opens a deal that is already assembled instead of a folder with holes in it. For car import, where the pack differs by country and by vehicle age, this is usually the first thing an owner notices after launch.
The agents in the freight solution
The ready freight and cargo solution is not one bot. It is a small team, each agent with its own rules and its own part of the work:
- Manager. Takes the enquiry, quotes from your tariffs, keeps the conversation going until the deal is ready to confirm.
- Dispatcher. Answers status questions and keeps the client informed when something changes on the route.
- Documents and contracts. Collects the pack, asks for what is missing, checks that nothing is absent before handover.
- First-line support. Handles the ordinary questions: terms, restrictions, insurance, how delivery to the door works.
- Reviews and reputation. Replies to reviews and public complaints on time and politely, including the hard ones.
- Win-back and retention. Comes back to shippers who stopped writing and to quotes that were never answered.
A task goes down the hierarchy and a report comes back up, so the owner is not reading a hundred chats to find out what happened last night.
What the agents never do
In freight, the rules matter more than the capabilities. These hold for every solution we run:
- They answer only from your data. No invented rates, no invented sailing dates, no discounts you did not approve.
- They keep clients apart. One client's shipment or price is never shown to another.
- A booking is a request until a person confirms it. The agent prepares it; your team says yes.
- When unsure, they hand over. With a short summary, so the manager does not start the conversation again.
- They do not pretend to be human. An agent will not claim to be your employee or deny being an AI assistant.
Your CRM, your channels, your new routes
Requests and bookings from every channel arrive in one list, SVI CRM, ready to confirm. If you already run something, leads can go to your own CRM instead, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Bitrix24, amoCRM and others, by key or by webhook. Clients write where they already write: a chat page by link, Telegram, WhatsApp, Instagram, email, a button on your site.
A new lane or a new country is configuration, not a project. Language, documents and country rules change in settings, so adding a direction does not mean hiring a team for it. Each agent role also runs on the model strongest for its kind of task, out of 89 of the best AI models, and when a better one appears it goes into the system without anything on your side changing.
If your work does not look like a standard forwarding desk, the shape is yours to set. In the agent builder Mai assembles a team from 19 roles with ready rules, plus any role you describe in your own words, and you set the rules in plain language without code. The rest of the ready-made solutions are next to it, with current prices on their pages.
Test it on your real enquiries before you pay
A freight owner has every reason to distrust a demo: demos never contain your awkward lanes. So the start goes in three steps, and the order is what makes it safe:
- Install. The solution is set up in your account and your channels are connected. This step is on us.
- Test mode. The agents answer your real incoming enquiries, but nothing reaches your clients. You read every reply, see the quotes they would have sent and get a report. This step is on us too.
- Launch. When the replies and the numbers look right, you switch it on. Payment starts only here.
In practice this is where the rate sheet gets fixed. You see the lanes where the agent had no data, the questions it handed over too early and the wording you would not use with your clients. You change the rule in one sentence and look again, on real messages, before a single client sees anything.
How to start
Open the freight and cargo page to see the agents, the channels and the current subscription, which depends on your request volume and routes.
Or start with a conversation with Mai: tell her what you carry and where, which channels your clients write in and what your rates look like. She will set the solution up and run the test mode with you, so the first thing you judge is your own night enquiries, answered.