AI Agent Automates Freight Bidding
Supply chain visibility platform project44 has launched an AI Freight Procurement Agent. The new tool automates the entire procurement lifecycle, including carrier selection, rate benchmarking, and negotiations, aiming to increase efficiency for shippers.
The new agent is an extension of project44's "Movement" Decision Intelligence platform and is integrated within their Intelligent Transportation Management System (TMS). This follows the August 2025 release of the Intelligent TMS, which early users report has increased on-time performance by 17% and saved over 60% of time on carrier quoting. The procurement agent builds on these capabilities by moving from analytics to autonomous action. Operating on project44's logistics data graph, the agent leverages data from over 259,000 carriers and 1.5 billion annual shipments. It processes more than 700 million logistics events daily to inform its decisions. This allows the system to replace static, spreadsheet-driven bid cycles with continuous sourcing based on live market conditions and verified carrier performance. Early deployments of the AI agent have demonstrated a 4.1% reduction in freight spend, a sourcing cycle time up to 75% faster, and a 70% decrease in manual coordination efforts. The tool automates mini-bids, evaluates carriers on cost, transit time, and reliability, and can either recommend or execute awards based on user-defined rules. This move toward "agentic AI" reflects a broader industry trend of shifting from passive visibility to autonomous decision-making in logistics. While traditional automation follows predefined rules, agentic AI can sense real-time conditions, weigh different goals like cost and service levels, and execute multi-step actions to resolve issues. This allows it to handle dynamic situations like shipment delays by autonomously evaluating alternatives and executing the best response. The AI Freight Procurement Agent is part of a larger multi-agent orchestration strategy at project44. The company's platform already uses dozens of AI agents to resolve supply chain exceptions, which have initiated nearly one million automated carrier communications in the past year to improve data quality. Founder and CEO Jett McCandless stated that freight procurement is one of the largest controllable cost drivers for shippers. The agent allows companies to set "guardrails," such as rate thresholds and carrier eligibility, within which the system can operate autonomously. The tool, available in March 2026, can be deployed in a recommendation-only mode to build trust before users grant it full autonomy.
