One inbox. A named agent on each job.
A forwarder’s inbox holds instructions from every principal and every overseas agent at once. TIO gives you AI agents that read those documents and do the back-office prep. Each action has its own setting, so you decide what runs on its own and what a person checks.
- Overseas agentpre-alerts and bills
- Principalrouting instructions
- Carrierarrival notices
- Consigneedelivery details
The inbox is where the work arrives, and where it stalls.
Every principal, carrier, and overseas agent emails the same inbox. Someone has to read each message, figure out which job it belongs to, and key the data into the TMS you already run. At a light queue one operator keeps up. Grow it, and the team stops moving freight and starts sorting mail. Hiring another person buys time, not leverage.
One agent per job function, end to end.
Order entry agent
Reads the bills and the packing list and creates the lot or delivery order in your TMS, charge lines included. It sends your team a review email that shows every field.
Audit agent
Re-checks finished records against their source documents and reports each difference with its cause. It reports; it does not change a record.
Finance agent
Matches each line of a vendor invoice to the job’s charges and books the payable for approved vendors. It does not pay. A line with no matching charge goes to a person.
LTL quote agent
Reads the rate request, classes the freight, pulls live carrier rates, and replies in the customer’s thread in seconds. When the customer says yes, the booking agent books the shipment.
Truckload quote agent
Builds the request, gets the truck cost, applies your margin rule, and sends the rate, with nobody chasing it.
Start with the agent that hurts most and add the rest as you go. Each agent works through an adapter built for your TMS, and each action has its own setting: it runs on its own, it sends the work for review, or it waits for a person’s reply. A customs filing is prepared as a draft, and a person files it. On customs and duty work, the customs preparation agent prepares filing data and answers duty rate questions with the source: see what the weekly HTS code and duty rate audit checks.
Each customer’s data stays separate. A person files customs.
Each customer’s operational data is kept in its own database. The agent write-event journal is protected from application edits and deletion. TMS write permissions are configured by action and customer, so a configured action can be disabled without disabling the others. During document extraction, source text is separated from model instructions and checked for allowed fields, formats and manipulation patterns. A customs filing is prepared as a draft, and a person on your team reviews and files it.
Where the work happens.
All solutions
Straight answers.
What is an AI agent workforce for a freight forwarder?
A roster of named AI agents, each doing one back-office job a person does by hand today: the quote agents price LTL and truckload requests, the booking agent books a quoted shipment the customer accepted, the order entry agent creates the lot in your TMS with charge lines, the finance agent matches vendor invoice lines to job charges and books the payable for approved vendors, and the audit agent re-checks finished records. At the US import forwarder running them in production, lot creation went from about 30 minutes to seconds, with the record sent to a person on the team for review. At a US trucking agency, the median LTL quote reply went from 12 minutes to about 12 seconds.
Do the agents replace our TMS or our team?
Neither. Your TMS stays the system of record, and your team keeps the judgment calls. TIO works through an adapter built for your TMS. Adapters are in production for two TMS platforms. The agents read the documents and do the prep. Each action has its own setting: it runs on its own, it sends the work for review, or it waits for a person's reply. Anything outside your rules goes to a person. A customs filing is always filed by a person. A team of 3 to 50 people keeps the judgment and loses the keying.
Do we run every agent at once?
No. Start with one agent on the job that costs the most hours, usually quoting or order entry, as a small paid pilot on real shipments. It goes live when the agent matches your team's work on real shipments, one action at a time. Add the second agent when the first has paid for itself in hours; the forwarder in production got roughly 17.5 hours a week back across the roster.
How do the agents learn our way of working?
From your corrections. When your team corrects an agent, TIO turns the correction into a rule for your operation: your customers, your consignees, your charge codes. TIO's team writes each rule with you. It applies to your operation only, and it is a rule, not model training. There is no training project and no dataset to assemble first.
See it on your own shipments.
Bring a real document and watch an agent take it to a finished draft while you’re on the call.
Book a demo