CargoAi’s AI Agent now handles 70% of air cargo email inquiries for airlines and forwarders

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At the CargoTech press conference at TIACA’s Air Cargo Forum, Matt Petot, Founder & CEO of the air cargo industry’s leading vertical AI company, presented the results of a seven-year journey: a platform built since 2019 to connect the industry’s rates, capacity and data, and, on it, a single AI agent, in production since October 2024, that reads quote requests for airline and GSA sales desks, answers airline customer mailboxes, drafts quotes for freight forwarders and chats with customers on WhatsApp. Two years to the week after that agent read its first forwarder request in production, CargoAi put a number on what it gives back: hours per month, and the people those hours free for commercial work.

“The real value of AI in air cargo is not simply in answering questions faster. It is in removing people’s workload,” said Matt Petot. “We have spent years building the connectivity, data and intelligence required to make that possible. Today, our customers can use our AI capabilities directly, build their own agents and automate real cargo workflows without having to start from scratch.”

Key facts: a seven-year journey, and the hours it hands back in 2026
Nothing presented in Miami is a launch or a roadmap. CargoAi started seven years ago, building the connectivity and data that air cargo lacked; machine-learning predictions, including arrival times, rate forecasts and quality scores, came onto the platform along the way, and the AI acceleration began two years ago, when the AI learned to read a quote request. AirAgent has worked airline and GSA mailboxes since early 2026; Aike answers in CargoMART, by email and on WhatsApp, and Auto Quote is reaching forwarders through 2026. What is new this year is the scale, and the hours it hands back. The figures below come from CargoAi’s production systems; time equivalents assume five minutes saved per request or answerable email, 13 minutes per forwarder quote and 160 working hours per person per month.

 

  • Airlines and GSAs: Quote intake. 446,000 shipment requests read by the AI in two years, from free-text emails, spreadsheets and photos, in 1.6 seconds each: about 37,000 hours of re-keying avoided, or 13 full-time people a month at today’s volume.
  • Airlines and GSAs: The mailbox. AirAgent has worked 105,000 airline customer emails this year, 25,000 in October alone. Seven in ten ask for a rate, a tracking update or a booking- answers the airline already has- so AirAgent drafts or sends them: about 6,100 hours handed back so far, nine full-time people a month at October’s pace. For a top-10 cargo airline receiving 2 million emails a year, that is roughly 117,000 hours a year, the work of 61 people, freed for selling and account management.
  • Freight forwarders: Quoting. Nine in ten priced searches on CargoAi are still quoted to the shipper by hand. Forwarders built 400,000 quotes in CargoAi’s quotation module in 2026 so far; with Auto Quote drafting them from the live rate, that is about 87,000 hours back, 54 full-time people across the platform every month.
  • The network behind the answers: 6,935 forwarding companies searching live rates in the last 12 months, answered by 209 airlines and with shipment tracking on more than 260.

One agent, three fronts: all live
The same AI moved along the shipment in three steps over the last two years. For airlines and GSAs, AirAgent sits on their own mailbox and works in four levels: filter, read, draft, reply, switched on mailbox by mailbox; the first customers moved from read-and-classify to drafting this autumn, with nine times more drafted answers in October than in September. For freight forwarders, Auto Quote reads the shipper’s request in the forwarder’s own mailbox and drafts the quote from live rates of more than 200 airlines, with trucking, local charges and the forwarder’s margins, inside the quotation module they already use. On every channel, Aike, CargoAi’s CargoCoPilot agent, answers rate, tracking and booking requests in natural language in CargoMART, by email and on WhatsApp; the WhatsApp channel has been live alongside AirAgent and is the same agent, not a new product.

For companies that want to build their own agents, CargoCONNECT APIs and the CargoAi MCP Connector expose the same live airline rates, schedules, capacity, booking and tracking capabilities to ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot and other MCP-compatible platforms, and to TMS and internal systems.

Already delivering for customers
STRACKER: Quotes in minutes instead of hours. Time-critical logistics specialist STRACKER uses CargoAi’s MCP Connector to power its own AI agents, automating key stages of its airfreight quotation process. STRACKER’s AI agents process incoming requests, retrieve live airline rates and availability, compare routing options and prepare quotations for expert validation. By reducing hours of manual research to minutes, STRACKER enables its team to focus on complex shipments while delivering faster, expert-validated quotations to customers.

“With CargoAi’s MCP Connector, our AI agents turn airline data into ready-to-send quotations within minutes, instead of hours. This allows our team to focus on what matters most: managing complex shipments and serving our customers,” said Carole Longe, Product Manager at STRACKER.

Flexport: AI agents connected to global freight operations. Using CargoAi’s APIs and MCP Connector to bring airline rates, schedules and market intelligence into its internal systems and AI-powered workflows, Flexport has automated freight consolidation and booking processes, with its AI agents identifying cost-efficient and reliable transport options.

“Flexport has been on a journey to automate supply chain tasks since its creation in 2013, and CargoAi has been a key partner in this journey. Our platforms are connected via API, so CargoAi rates, schedules and insights feed directly into our system. We also use CargoAi MCP connector to merge their intelligence and data into our workflows. This in turn allows us to automatically consolidate freight and process bookings using AI agents to find the lowest-cost, most reliable options,” said Alexis Boutet, VP Global Head of Airfreight at Flexport.

Time handed back to people
CargoAi measures its agents in time per person freed for other work: up to 60% of a sales desk’s quote-intake time, up to 70% of a customer-service agent’s mailbox time once AirAgent drafts or replies, and up to 80% of a pricing desk’s quoting time with Auto Quote. “People should work on the shipment, not on the inbox,” said Matt Petot.