Quote and booking intake
Extracting the shipment detail from an email or attachment into structured fields for your TMS, with the source text shown next to each field for a quick check.
Industries
Logistics AI for the inbox that runs the operation
Freight still moves on email. Quotes, bookings, amendments, customs paperwork and exception chasing arrive as unstructured messages and get rekeyed into a TMS by hand - which is precisely the work that document AI does well.
The pressure right now
What we hear from logistics
- Quote and booking requests arriving as free text and being rekeyed manually
- Customs documentation errors causing delays and demurrage costs
- Exception management - the delay, the missed collection, the wrong address - consuming the operations desk
- Proof of delivery and invoice queries that take days to resolve across parties
- Margin per shipment too thin to absorb administrative rework
Where it pays off
Six places AI earns its keep here
Not everything on this list will apply to you. Most organisations start with one and extend once it has been measured.
Customs documentation support
Assembling and cross-checking declaration data against the commercial documents, flagging mismatches before submission rather than after a hold.
Exception management
Detecting the delay, drafting the customer notification with the actual context, and escalating decisions - reroute, rebook, absorb the cost - to a person.
Proof of delivery and query resolution
Matching PODs to invoices and shipments and drafting the response to the query, which is where finance and operations usually lose days.
Carrier and rate comparison
Assembling comparable options from the rate sheets and emails your team already receives, so the choice is informed rather than habitual.
Operational reporting
On-time performance, exception causes and cost-to-serve pulled together without a weekly spreadsheet rebuild.
Where we would start
The first three moves
1
Attack the intake
Quote and booking extraction is high-volume, measurable and immediately felt by the operations desk.
2
Keep the human at the decision
The system prepares; a person decides on cost, reroute and customer commitments.
3
Measure per-shipment admin cost
It is the number that makes or breaks the business case, and most operators have never measured it directly.
Risk and regulation
The part most suppliers skip
Where the risk sits
- Customs declaration accuracy - the legal responsibility stays with the declarant
- Dangerous goods and restricted commodity handling must never be inferred by a model
- Driver and personal data under UK GDPR, including telematics
- Commercial confidentiality of customer rates and volumes
- Third-party carrier data flowing into AI processing without permission
How we handle it
Customs and dangerous goods classification is prepared and cross-checked, never asserted. The declarant reviews and remains legally responsible, and the system is designed to make that review fast.
Rate and volume data is commercially sensitive; where your customer contracts restrict third-party processing, the deployment runs inside your own boundary.
Anything involving safety, restricted commodities or a customer cost commitment escalates to a named person by design.
Where this fits
Where to go next
Questions
Questions from logistics
The extraction layer is TMS-agnostic and writes into whatever interface your system exposes - API where one exists, and a reviewed import where it does not. We confirm the route during scoping.
It can suggest and cross-check against your own history and the commercial documents. It should not decide: classification errors carry duty and penalty consequences, and the declarant remains responsible.
Intake extraction pays off at surprisingly modest volumes, because the cost per rekeyed booking is high and constant. Below roughly a few dozen bookings a day the sensible starting point is usually a narrower workflow.
Start with an audit of what you already run
Two to four weeks to an evidenced picture of your AI use, spend and risk - and a ranked list of what to do first.