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autonomous quote management freight

Stop Losing Deals to Slow Quoting

AI-powered autonomous quote management for freight forwarders — from RFQ inbox to client quote in under 10 minutes.

Autonomous AI that generates, compares, and sends freight quotes — cutting turnaround from hours to minutes while your team focuses on relationships.

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Built For

Who This Is For

  • Freight forwarders processing 30+ RFQs per day across sea, air, and road
  • Sales teams losing deals because quotes take 4–24 hours to turnaround
  • Pricing teams manually pulling rates from 5+ carrier portals for every single quote
  • Logistics companies where quoting accuracy depends on which sales rep handles the request

Before CargoIQ

Every hour your quote is late, your win probability drops 30%

In freight forwarding, speed kills — or speed wins. When an RFQ arrives by email, your sales rep has to read the requirements, log into 3–7 carrier portals or rate management systems, pull applicable rates, calculate margins, factor in surcharges and accessorials, create a quote document, get approval if the margin is non-standard, and send it back. For a complex multi-leg shipment, this takes 2–6 hours. For a simple lane, it still takes 30–60 minutes. Meanwhile, the shipper sent the same RFQ to 3–5 forwarders, and the first credible quote back often wins. Your best sales reps should be building relationships and closing strategic accounts — not copy-pasting rates between spreadsheets and carrier portals.

Average quote turnaround of 4–24 hours, while competitors using modern tools respond in under 60 minutes

Sales reps spending 50–60% of their day on rate lookups and quote formatting instead of selling

No margin consistency — individual reps apply different markups based on intuition, relationship, or simply what they remember

Quote-to-book conversion below 20% because prospects go with whoever responds first with a credible price

Complex multi-leg and multi-modal quotes require senior staff, creating a bottleneck on your most experienced people

No systematic follow-up on sent quotes — expired quotes sit in email threads with no tracking or win/loss analysis

Rate data scattered across carrier portals, spreadsheets, email confirmations, and rate management systems with no single source of truth

What We Build

Capabilities

1

Automated RFQ intake from email, portals, and web forms

The system monitors your sales inbox and connected portals for incoming RFQs, extracts shipment requirements (origin, destination, commodity, weight, volume, incoterm, timeline, special requirements), and creates a structured quote request — even from unstructured email text. It handles follow-up emails that modify the original request, grouping them into a single evolving RFQ.

2

AI-powered rate comparison across carriers and rate sources

Automatically pulls applicable rates from your contracted carrier agreements, rate management systems (CargoWise rate module, Freightos, WebCargo, Cargobase), and spot rate APIs. The system normalizes all rates to a comparable format, factoring in surcharges, bunker adjustment factors, peak season supplements, and transit time differences so the comparison is apples-to-apples.

3

Dynamic margin optimization per customer, lane, and volume

Instead of flat markups, the system applies dynamic margin logic based on: customer tier and relationship value, lane competitiveness (how many forwarders serve this route), historical win rates at different price points, current market conditions, and your target margin thresholds. This means your best customers get competitive pricing while spot inquiries capture maximum margin.

4

Auto-generated quote documents with your branding

The system generates professional quote documents in your branded template, including all charges broken down by leg, applicable surcharges clearly listed, validity period, terms and conditions, and transit time estimates. Documents are generated as PDF and can be attached to auto-drafted emails for rep review before sending.

5

Intelligent follow-up and expiry tracking

Every sent quote is tracked through its lifecycle: sent, viewed (if email tracking is enabled), followed up, won, lost, or expired. The system automatically triggers follow-up reminders based on configurable rules (e.g., follow up 48 hours after send, again at 80% of validity period). Lost quotes feed into win/loss analysis dashboards so you can identify pricing or speed issues by lane and customer segment.

6

Approval workflows for non-standard margins and high-value shipments

Configurable rules route quotes that fall outside standard margin bands to the appropriate approver — pricing manager for margin exceptions, senior sales for strategic accounts, operations for capacity-constrained lanes. Approvers get a mobile-friendly notification with full context and can approve/reject/modify with a single tap.

In Practice

Real-World Use Cases

Standard lane RFQ: email to quote in under 10 minutes

A shipper emails an RFQ for a 40ft FCL from Shanghai to Rotterdam. The system extracts the requirements, pulls rates from 4 contracted carriers and 2 spot sources, applies the customer's negotiated margin tier, generates a branded quote PDF, and drafts an email for the sales rep to review and send. Total elapsed time: 8 minutes. The rep spent 30 seconds reviewing and hitting send.

Multi-leg intermodal quote with air and sea components

A customer needs goods moved from a factory in Shenzhen to a warehouse in Munich, with the first leg by sea to Hamburg and the last leg by road. The system breaks the shipment into legs, sources rates for each segment independently, calculates combined pricing with handoff costs, and presents 3 routing options ranked by cost and transit time. What would take a senior rep 2–3 hours is ready for review in 15 minutes.

Spot rate surge detection and margin protection

During a capacity crunch on the Asia–Europe trade lane, spot rates spike 40% in a week. The system detects the shift through carrier API feeds, automatically flags all pending quotes on affected lanes as potentially under-priced, and recalculates quotes with updated rates before they're sent — preventing the margin erosion that typically happens when sales teams use stale rate data.

Implementation

How We Deploy It

Timeline: 6–10 weeks from kickoff to production

1

Weeks 1–2: Discovery — map current quoting workflow, catalog rate sources and carrier contracts, define margin rules and approval thresholds

2

Weeks 3–5: Rate source integration, RFQ parsing engine, margin optimization logic build

3

Weeks 6–8: Quote document templates, email automation, approval workflows, CRM integration

4

Weeks 9–10: UAT with sales team, A/B testing against manual quotes, production deploy and hypercare

Results

Real Numbers from Production Systems

85%

Faster quote turnaround

Average time from RFQ receipt to quote delivery dropped from 4.5 hours to 40 minutes

Respond to RFQs before competitors even open the email

3x

More quotes handled per person

Sales reps process 3x the quote volume without additional hires, shifting time from data entry to relationship building

Scale quoting capacity without hiring

40%

Higher quote-to-book conversion

Faster response times and more accurate pricing improve win rates from an industry-average 15–20% to 25–30%

Faster response + accurate pricing = more wins

0

Missed quote deadlines

Automated tracking ensures every RFQ gets a response before the customer's stated deadline

Tech Stack: PythonLangGraphAzuren8nOpenAI GPT-4oPostgreSQLRedis
Integrations: CargoWise Rate ModuleFreightos / WebCargoCargobaseXeneta (market rate benchmarking)Microsoft 365 / Gmail (email ingestion)Salesforce / HubSpot CRMSAP TMCustom rate databases via API

Works with your existing TMS

Direct integration with CargoWise, SAP TM, Oracle TMS, Microsoft Dynamics, and Descartes.

View Integrations

Frequently Asked Questions

How does autonomous quote management work?
The system monitors incoming RFQs from email, web forms, and freight portals. When an RFQ arrives, it extracts shipment requirements using natural language understanding (handling unstructured emails, not just forms), pulls applicable rates from all your connected rate sources (carrier contracts, rate management systems, spot rate APIs), calculates optimal margin based on customer tier, lane competitiveness, and your pricing rules, generates a branded quote document, and either auto-sends or queues for rep review — all without manual intervention. The entire process runs in minutes, not hours.
Can it handle complex multi-leg quotes?
Yes. The system handles multi-modal, multi-leg quotes including sea-air combinations, cross-dock transfers, and intermodal routing. It breaks complex shipments into individual legs, sources rates independently for each segment, calculates combined pricing including handoff and transloading costs, and presents multiple routing options ranked by cost, transit time, and reliability. It also handles project cargo quotes where standard tariffs don't apply, flagging these for manual pricing with pre-populated shipment details.
Does it replace my sales team?
No — it replaces the spreadsheet work your sales team does, not the selling. Today, your best reps spend 50–60% of their time on rate lookups, carrier portal navigation, margin calculations, and document formatting. This system handles all of that, so your reps can spend their time on what actually wins business: building relationships, understanding customer needs, negotiating strategic deals, and proactively reaching out to prospects. Most of our clients see their reps handle 3x the quote volume while reporting higher job satisfaction because they're doing sales work, not data entry.
How does it connect to my rate databases?
We integrate directly with your existing rate sources through their APIs or data exports. This includes CargoWise rate modules, Freightos/WebCargo, Cargobase, Xeneta for market benchmarking, carrier-specific portals, and custom internal rate databases. If a rate source has an API, we connect to it. If it only exports CSV/Excel, we set up automated ingestion. The system maintains a unified rate index that normalizes rates from all sources into a comparable format, so comparison is always apples-to-apples regardless of how different carriers structure their tariffs.
What if a quote needs manual review?
Fully configurable. You set the thresholds that determine what auto-sends and what needs human approval. Common rules include: margin below X% (routes to pricing manager), shipment value above $Y (routes to senior sales), new customer first quote (routes to account manager), hazmat or oversized cargo (routes to operations), and deviation from customer's historical pricing by more than Z%. Approvers get a notification with full context — shipment details, rate comparison, margin analysis, and customer history — and can approve, reject, or modify from their phone.
How do you handle rate confidentiality between customers?
Strict customer isolation is enforced at every level. Rate negotiations, margin agreements, and pricing history for Customer A are never visible to or influenced by Customer B's data, even though the system optimizes across your entire book of business. The margin optimization engine uses anonymized market patterns, not cross-customer data. Access controls ensure each sales rep only sees quotes and pricing data for their assigned accounts.

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Ready to Automate Your Quote Management?

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