How We Built an AI Quoting Workflow for a Freight and Logistics Client

Our client, a courier and freight business operating across several international markets, had a pricing team spending much of each day pulling information together before a quote could go out. 

We built a custom quoting platform powered by Claude that brings inquiries, shipment details and carrier rates into one workflow, while keeping the final decision with the team. 

The challenge 

The team's shared inbox received around 1,500 emails a day. Genuine quotation requests sat alongside spam and unrelated correspondence, and the team had to sort through it all manually. 

On average, this took around 30 minutes of agent time per inquiry. 

For a four-person quoting team, that work became a bottleneck. Inquiry volumes were growing, and keeping up often meant relying on overtime. 

The question was how to automate it to quote faster without losing the accuracy that comes from an agent checking every quote. 

The solution

We built a custom quoting platform that brings incoming inquiries, shipment requirements and carrier comparisons into a single workflow, using the Claude API to process customer emails. 

The solution brought together three core areas: 

Inbox triage 

Incoming emails are sorted automatically and inquiries with missing information or other issues are flagged for attention. 

Requirement extraction 

For each quotation request, the platform pulls out the shipment's details and structures them into a clear format for agents to review. 

Rate comparison and quote preparation 

The platform compares carrier rates, applies pricing terms and prepares the quote. Agents review everything in one view and adjust it before sending. 

A central dashboard now tracks every inquiry and quote status. Next, the workflow will extend to preparing validated customer replies. 

What changed in the business 

The biggest change was speed. Average quote preparation time fell from around 30 minutes to 5 minutes per inquiry. 

The platform now automatically filters roughly 1,500 emails the team receives each day, so agents spend their time on genuine quotation requests. 

The same four-person team now handles more than 200 quotes a day, with less reliance on overtime.

Agents' work has shifted from assembling quotes across separate systems to reviewing prepared information and validating the proposed price. That has freed time for customer follow-up and the conversations that bring in new business. 

The result is not simply a faster inbox. It's a quoting process built around the team's judgment, with the manual groundwork taken off their plate. 

Because every quote still passes through an agent before it reaches the customer, the gains came without giving up accuracy or control. 

For teams handling high volumes of inquiries every day, taking the manual groundwork out of each one can change what the same team is able to deliver.