The Next Frontier in Freight Forwarding
Freight forwarding plays a pivotal role in global logistics, orchestrating the movement of goods across borders by coordinating with carriers (air, sea, rail, and land), handling bookings, managing customs documentation, and ensuring final delivery. Forwarders act as intermediaries between shippers and transport providers, stitching together the infrastructure that powers $20T in global trade.
It’s a relationship-driven, document-heavy business that sits between domestic trucking (brokerage) and the broader end-to-end supply chain. Unlike freight brokerage, which is largely about matching trucks to loads domestically, forwarding involves international trade, multimodal coordination, and compliance with a patchwork of global regulations. This makes it one of the most operationally complex businesses in the world, and, therefore, one of the most ripe for AI disruption.
Despite the sector’s strategic importance, freight forwarding still runs on decades-old infrastructure. Most workflows rely on email, spreadsheets, and custom ERP systems patched together with manual data entry and tribal knowledge. Employees juggle 5-7 disconnected tools for quoting, tracking, CRM, and billing. According to one BCG report from 2023, traditional forwarders spend an average of 62 minutes to process a single shipment and shippers can wait up to 100 hours to receive a final quote. It's no wonder shippers feel frustrated, and forwarders are stuck spending hours on low-leverage, manual tasks.
The initial opportunity for AI is clear: eliminate the 80% of repetitive, rules-based tasks that slow teams down. For instance, AI agents can automatically respond to RFQs, parse unstructured documents like commercial invoices, classify customs information, and push updates into backend systems. This means quote turnaround time drops from hours to minutes, customs workflows are streamlined without needing U.S.-based compliance teams to touch every file, and frontline support teams can focus on exceptions rather than routine status checks.
One high-impact example is customs processing. In 2023, there was this ruling from U.S. Customs clarifying that even data entry can’t be outsourced when conducting customs business (which is how Customs somewhat broadly classifies the interaction of brokers and CBP). U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) defines “Customs Business” very broadly, it includes:
Preparing documents or forms (in any format)
Electronically transmitting documents, invoices, bills, or portions thereof
Any activity “in furtherance of such preparation” intended to be filed with CBP
In other words, due to regulatory requirements, any company handling U.S. customs documentation must use U.S.-based staff, meaning freight forwarders can’t outsource this work to overseas teams. I spoke to Robert Khachatryan, Founder and CEO of Freight Right Global Logistics, who told me they have 45 employees in the Philippines handling sales and operations, but they still need costly, specialized U.S. workers just for customs. AI agents trained on customs workflows can dramatically reduce this burden by automating data extraction, classification, and validation – ensuring compliance while scaling capacity without always adding headcount.
What makes freight forwarding especially attractive for AI is that the problems are well-defined but poorly solved. There’s a long tail of messy processes that follow consistent patterns – making them perfect for automation – but the variability and domain-specific nuance has historically made them hard to tackle with off-the-shelf software. Large incumbents like Project44 want to be the one-stop shop, but most forwarders know the truth: there is no single platform that can do it all. The winning AI players won’t be those with the most APIs, they’ll be the ones who deeply embed into existing operations and evolve with the forwarders themselves. This is the philosophy of companies like Freight Right, which – like many progressive logistics companies – is looking to incubate or embed AI start ups in their operations.
Freight forwarding is a massive industry, and yet it's under-automated and underserved by modern software. With the right mix of technical horsepower and domain expertise, AI-native companies have a rare chance to build the infrastructure layer that forwarders actually want: fast, flexible, and focused on real work. The future of forwarding won’t be chatbots, it’ll be full-stack AI teammates working shoulder-to-shoulder with ops teams, quietly powering global trade.