The complete guide to freight quotation automation.

Why quoting speed decides revenue

The most-cited dataset on quoting behaviour is the Freightos Mystery Shopper series, which posed as a real shipper and requested quotes from the world’s twenty largest forwarders across several years. The results were consistent and brutal:

An independent replication by Rippey AI in 2022 approached 86 forwarders: only 31% responded at all, with an average response time of roughly 50 hours. Whatever the exact figure, the shape of the finding never changes — the default state of the industry is slow and silent, which is precisely why a fast desk converts disproportionately.

Speed compounds through the funnel: answering more RFQs (coverage) multiplies with answering them earlier (win rate). One live deployment moved from 35% to 73% win rate when quote response fell from over an hour to fifteen minutes — the shipment count nearly doubled on the same enquiry flow.

How quote desks work today

A typical SME forwarder’s quoting flow has five manual steps, and each one leaks time or accuracy:

• Intake. RFQs arrive as email threads, forty-line Excels, PDFs, and WhatsApp messages — often photos of packing lists. Someone re-keys them.
• Rate lookup. The pricing head checks contract cards, logs into two or three carrier portals, or emails partners — per enquiry.
• Assembly. Legs, surcharges and validity are combined in Excel or from memory. This is where surcharge lines go missing.
• Margin decision. Applied from experience: what this customer pays, what the lane bears, what was quoted last time — knowledge that lives in one person's head.
• Send and (rarely) chase. The reply goes out hours or days later. Freightos found only 8% of quoting forwarders ever followed up.

The five places rates actually live

“Where do your rates come from?” has five honest answers, and most desks run several at once. Any serious automation has to read all of them:

Carrier digitisation made S2 and S3 fast — CMA CGM reports that more than 60% of its spot volume now flows through SpotOn. But a carrier portal solves the carrier’s side. Your customer doesn’t want a port-to-port spot rate; they want a door-to-door price with surcharges complete and your margin applied. Carriers automated the rate; the quote is still yours to automate.

Anatomy of an accurate quote

An accurate freight quotation gets five things right simultaneously:

• The chargeable basis. Air: max(actual, volumetric at /6000 — or /5000 for express) across IATA weight breaks. LCL: weight-or-measure, per tonne or CBM, whichever is greater.
• Complete surcharge lines. BAF, CAF, THC at both ends, LSS, CIC, security and fuel for air — a missing line is margin you silently donated.
• Scope per incoterm. EXW/FOB/CIF/DAP/DDP decide which legs and charge blocks belong in the price at all.
• Validity that matches your buy rate. Quoting seven days against a spot rate valid for three hours is an unpriced gamble.
• A margin decision, not a habit. Floor known, customer pattern considered, negotiation buffer deliberate.

The metrics of a quoting desk

Most desks track one number (win rate) and feel the rest. A managed desk tracks a tree:

What AI automation actually changes

Mapped to the five manual steps, automation done properly changes each one’s economics:

• Intake becomes parsing. Any format — email, Excel, PDF, WhatsApp photo — becomes structured shipment lines in seconds. Your coordinator verifies instead of re-keying.
• Lookup becomes federation. One system reads contract cards, portals, APIs, partner replies and history simultaneously, and shows the source of every number.
• Assembly becomes a checklist the machine runs. Surcharge completeness and validity checks execute every time, identically — at 2 p.m. or 2 a.m.
• The margin decision gets a memory. Floors enforced mechanically; the customer's negotiation pattern surfaced before the draft is approved.
• The chase becomes standard. Every sent quote is followed up, and replies are classified — accepted, negotiating, lost, silent.

The compounding effect shows up in the numbers a desk already understands: coverage climbs toward 100%, response falls to minutes, and win rate follows. The arithmetic is straightforward — our calculator runs it on your own volumes.

What must stay human

The strongest argument against quotation automation is a quote sent wrong at machine speed. The answer isn’t less automation — it is a gate. Parsing, pricing and drafting can run autonomously because they are verifiable; the send is a commercial commitment with your name on it, and it should require a human tap until trust is earned — and for acceptance, always.

In practice the gate is also where automation earns adoption: your pricing head stops being a typist and becomes an approver, reviewing drafts with the margin math and risk flags attached. The expertise stays; the drudgery leaves.

Getting started in 14 days

• Days 1–3: scope rate sources, channels, and your house quote format.
• Days 4–10: configure margin logic and floors; the team shadows the desk's drafts.
• Days 11–14: first real quotes go out under supervised approval.

Nothing gets ripped out: the desk runs alongside Excel and Tally, or CargoWise, Logi-Sys, Kale, Shipsy and Magaya. The one process that hurts most simply starts working differently.