AI Workflow
The Afternoon I Watched a Freight Quote Take 3 Hours—And What I Did About It
Last year, I sat beside a freight operations executive at a mid-sized forwarding company in Chennai. I wasn't there to sell anything. I was there to learn.
A customer email came in at 2:15 PM. Simple request: FCL rates from Nhava Sheva to Rotterdam, 2x40' HC, general cargo.
What I watched over the next three hours changed how I think about this industry.
2:15 PM – The email arrives. The ops executive opens it, reads it, then opens a spreadsheet. Not the rate sheet—a tracker to log that a request came in.
2:23 PM – He searches through his inbox for the latest rate update from their carrier partner. Finds three emails. Not sure which one is current.
2:41 PM – He calls the carrier. They're checking. They'll call back.
2:58 PM – Carrier calls back with a base rate. But what about the destination charges? "I'll send you the tariff sheet."
3:15 PM – Tariff sheet arrives. It's a 47-page PDF. He searches for Rotterdam.
3:32 PM – He finds the charges. Opens another spreadsheet—his margin calculator. Enters numbers manually.
3:51 PM – His manager walks over. "Did you reply to that Rotterdam inquiry?" Not yet. Almost done.
4:22 PM – He opens the company's quote template in Word. Starts copy-pasting numbers. Realizes he forgot the free days. Goes back to the PDF.
4:47 PM – Quote sent.
Two and a half hours. For one quote. One route. One customer.
I asked him: "How many of these do you handle a day?"
He laughed. "On a good day? Fifteen. On a bad day? Thirty."
What I Learned That Afternoon
This wasn't a technology problem. This was a systems problem. Every piece of information existed somewhere—carrier rates in emails, tariffs in PDFs, margins in spreadsheets, templates in Word. But nothing talked to anything else.
The ops executive wasn't slow. He was navigating chaos. And he was doing it remarkably well, considering.
But here's what haunted me: while he was building that one quote, three more rate requests sat unread in his inbox. One of those customers probably called a competitor who picked up the phone faster.
Speed isn't just efficiency. In freight forwarding, speed is revenue.
What We Built Because of That Day
That afternoon in Chennai became the reason VoltusFreight exists.
We asked ourselves: What if an AI could do what I watched that executive do—but in 4 minutes instead of 3 hours?
Read the email. Understand the requirement. Pull the right rates. Apply the right margins. Generate a professional quote. Send it.
Not a chatbot. Not a dashboard with more data to look at. An AI that actually does the work.
Today, our AI Email Agents process rate requests the moment they land. They read, they understand, they quote. The same Rotterdam inquiry that took 3 hours? Done in under 5 minutes.
That ops executive in Chennai? He doesn't spend his days building quotes anymore. He spends them managing exceptions, building relationships, and actually growing the business.
A Question for You
How many hours did your team spend on quotes this week? And how many of those quotes did you actually win?
If those numbers bother you, we should talk.
