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Case study · Freight agency
How an AI layer over a freight agency's existing tech stack cut carrier vetting time in half, put every open lead on a follow-up cadence, and stopped hot-load milestones from being dropped, all inside 60 days.
The client is a freight agency operating under a medium-size logistics company. At their request, the agency and its parent are not named. Results are as reported by the client at the 60-day mark.
The agency runs a real book of business with a small team: an owner who is also the lead salesperson, and an operations manager who keeps freight moving. Their tech stack was fine. A TMS, load boards, and subscriptions to the carrier-vetting services every serious broker uses. The problem was not the tools. It was the hours between them.
Every load meant sourcing a carrier, capturing the VIN and MC/DOT details, and checking the carrier across Highway, Carrier 411, and Freight Validate by hand. Every quote that went out without a reply sat in an inbox waiting for a follow-up that happened when someone remembered. Hot loads needed milestone updates that competed with everything else on the desk.
The owner put it plainly: the agency was growing, and the two of them were the ceiling.
We did not replace anything. The brief was an AI layer over the existing stack, scoped to the two workflows that were burning the most hours, delivered in two phases so each one could be measured before the next one started.
When a carrier is identified for a load, the AI captures the VIN and MC/DOT details, runs the cross-checks against Highway, Carrier 411, and Freight Validate, and produces a single vetting file with fraud and double-brokering flags raised up front. The operations manager still makes the call on every carrier; the difference is that the file is complete before she looks at it, instead of being assembled while she does.
Every open lead and unanswered quote went onto a follow-up cadence written in the owner's own voice. Not a drip sequence: each touch references the specific lane, the specific quote, and the specific conversation. Replies route straight to the owner. Silence gets a smart next touch. Nothing goes out that the owner has not approved as a template first.
Carrier vetting and VIN capture now take about half the time they did, and the operations manager starts each carrier decision with a complete file. Every open lead is being worked; the number that were falling through the cracks went to zero because there are no cracks left for them to fall through. Hot-load milestones, which used to compete for attention with vetting and follow-up, have not been dropped since.
Add it up and the owner and operations manager have roughly eight hours a week back between them. That time has gone where an agency owner's time should go: to customers, to carriers they want to keep, and to the next account.
Because each phase paid for itself, the agency is moving on to the next ones in sequence:
Three reasons, and none of them are the technology. The scope was narrow: one workflow at a time, measured against numbers the agency already tracked. Nothing was replaced, so there was no migration, no retraining, and no risk to freight in motion. And the person designing it had run a freight desk, so the AI was built around how the work actually happens rather than how a software demo says it should.
If you run a freight agency, a brokerage, or a 3PL and the owner is still the vetting desk and the follow-up desk, this is the pilot we would start with. Thirty days, one workflow, measured results. If it doesn't deliver, you walk with no further obligation.
One short call. We'll pinpoint the highest-ROI place to start, and show you exactly how we'd build and run it in 30 days.
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