Logistics & Freight
Freight quoting and bidding AI for forwarders
A forwarding desk wins on speed to quote and loses margin on the rates it types by hand. We built the engine that does both, live on a global bidding desk.
- Quote time
- 20s
- Bidding desk
- Live
What is broken before we arrive
The quote arrives after the decision
Industry response times average around 90 hours, while the forwarders that win reply in under 30 minutes. Roughly 90% of shippers now expect a digital turnaround inside two hours. The gap is not effort. It is that a pricer is reading rate sheets by hand while the clock runs.
Two to four hours of a pricer's day, per RFQ
Every quote means opening carrier sheets, finding the lane, applying the density break, adding the surcharges, and checking the destination's customs rules. Do that forty times a week and the desk's best pricer never touches the accounts that actually need judgement.
The margin logic lives in someone's head
Buy rate to sell rate is the business. It is also the part most forwarders keep in a spreadsheet one person maintains. Generic quoting software cannot hold it, because it is the thing that makes the forwarder different from the forwarder next door.
Autonomous Bidding & Pricing Intelligence
OaK, Options as Knowledge, ingests carrier rate data, applies the desk's own pricing logic, and returns a competitive quote in about twenty seconds. The pricing rules are the client's, encoded rather than replaced, so the system quotes the way the desk's best pricer quotes.
The China Rate Calculator v2 carries an X-Works cost breakdown, three-bucket pricing tiers and a multi-airport rate matrix, so a lane that can route through more than one origin is priced against all of them rather than the one somebody remembered. Brazil lanes run a Siscomex integration for customs compliance at quote time, not after the booking.
It runs on the live bidding desk. Not a pilot, not a sandbox.
How the build runs
Map the desk, not the software
We sit with the pricers and record how a quote is actually built: which sheet, which break, which surcharge, which exception. That map is the specification.
Encode the pricing logic
Rate ingestion, density breaks, tiering and the margin rules become code with tests, so a change to a tier is a reviewed change and not a spreadsheet edit nobody saw.
Wire the compliance edge
Customs and documentation rules for the lanes that need them run inside the quote path, so an ineligible routing never reaches the customer as a price.
Ship to the desk and compound
The desk quotes from it daily. Every correction a pricer makes is a rule the system keeps.