FreightOS rolls AI quoting stack

Freight software sounds boring until you remember what it controls — who moves your inventory, how much you pay, and whether a shipment gets stuck in customs or rerouted mid-crisis. That whole chain still runs on a shocking amount of email, rate sheets, PDFs, and human follow-up. Freightos is trying to turn that mess into something closer to modern commerce software. The new angle is AI, but not as a chatbot gimmick. Basically, it wants AI sitting on top of quoting, booking, tracking, and procurement so more of the freight transaction happens automatically. (theloadstar.com) ### What problem is Freightos actually chasing? The core problem is that international freight is still fragmented. A shipper asks for a quote. A forwarder checks carrier rates in one system, local charges in another, trucking somewhere else, then emails back a price. If the customer books, the work jumps again — into booking, document handling, tracking, and exception management. Eve(theloadstar.com)and booking rails; now it is trying to own more of the decision layer that sits above those rails. (theloadstar.com) ### Why is quoting the beachhead? Because quoting is where revenue starts. If you answer slowly, you lose the shipment before booking even becomes relevant. Freightos and WebCargo have been building around that for a while, and the multimodal push matters here. In November 2025, Freightos launched WebCargo Rate & Quote Ocean to bring ocean pricing into the same environment as air, so (theloadstar.com) 75% faster, which is a huge deal in a market where response speed often decides the winner. (prnewswire.com) ### Where does AI fit into that? Turns out AI is less about “write me a poem” and more about “parse this ugly freight email and build the quote before a person opens it.” Freight workflows generate exactly the kind of repetitive, semi-structured tasks that models are good at — inbox triage, extracting shipment det(prnewswire.com)ed for quote building and customer service, with API-connected quoting setups cutting response times by 65% and improving quote-to-booking conversion without extra headcount. (webcargo.co) ### Is this just about forwarders? No — Freightos is also selling the other side. Its enterprise pitch is that shippers can compare spot and contract rates, book, track, manage documents, and plug the whole thing into ERP or TMS systems. Freightos says users can cut air cargo costs by 10% to 20%, reduce manual communication by 80%, and save two to four days per shipment from quote to final delivery. That tells you (webcargo.co)e in every day. (freightos.com) ### Why is the company leaning so hard into this now? Because growth alone has not been enough. Freightos is still trying to reach profitability, and management has been unusually clear that AI is part of both the product story and the cost story. In April, the company said Q1 2026 transactions reached 425,000 and gross booking value hit about $344 million, but it also described platform activity as a lagging indicator and(freightos.com)eks earlier, Pablo Pinillos told The Loadstar that Freightos is using “agentic AI” to automate decisions and avoid growing its cost base. (freightos.com) ### So what’s the real bet? The bet is that the company controlling the quote can pull the rest of the workflow toward itself. If Freightos helps generate the quote, recommend the carrier, trigger the booking, monitor the shipment, and feed procurement data back into the next decision, it stops being just a transaction venue. It becomes the operating layer where freight choices get made. That is a much bigger position — and a much stickier one. (theloadstar.com) ### What’s the catch? Freight is messy in ways software people hate. Rates change constantly. Local surcharges are inconsistent. Customs rules vary by country. Carriers, forwarders, and shippers all use different systems. So the hard part is not building one smart feature. It is stitching together enough reliable data and integrations that automation can be trusted. Freightos has some of that network already, but the last mile is always where logistics projects get ugly. (prnewswire.com) ### Bottom line? Freightos is not just sprinkling AI on top of a booking marketplace. It is trying to use quoting as the entry point to automate the whole freight decision stack. If that works, smaller teams can move faster and bigger shippers get more control. If it doesn’t, the industry goes back to living in inboxes. (theloadstar.com)