The freight forwarding industry is full of artificial intelligence demonstrations. The true test is whether the technology can cope with the daily disorder of the quote desk: emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, carrier portals, agent responses, and rates that change before anyone can clean the data. That is where Sumeet Trehan, the founder of Starboard, sees the market heading. His argument is not that AI will eliminate small and mid-sized forwarders. Rather, it is that these forwarders are too crucial to global commerce and too connected to their clients to be pushed aside simply because larger players have superior tools.
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Trehan reached this conclusion after a career at Maersk, BCG, and Flexport, where he helped establish the company’s Canadian operations. At Flexport, he said he started to wonder whether digital freight was tackling the right issue. Trehan stated that small and mid-size freight forwarders are indispensable for global trade, and their operational know-how cannot be replicated by a digital freight forwarder. Starboard’s proposal is that local forwarders should maintain the customer relationship and operational expertise, while the platform gives them some of the benefits usually linked to larger rivals: better technology, stronger procurement, and eventually financial infrastructure.
Forwarding remains a business driven by relationships, local presence, and exceptions. The person who knows which carrier office to contact or which route will break down still matters. However, the strain on smaller forwarders is significant. In developed markets, Trehan noted, forwarding has become a low-margin business, often running on net margins of 1-2%. After the freight rate itself, labor is the largest expense. He described this as nearly an existential crisis for many freight forwarders, asking how they can reduce costs, and stressed that it is not a five-year strategic plan but something that needs to be done immediately for many of their customers.
Starboard’s initial product focuses on quoting. In spot-heavy forwarding markets, importers and exporters may send the same request to multiple forwarders at once. A small or mid-sized forwarder might get 20-30 quote requests per day, Trehan said, with each taking one to two hours to prepare. Average response times can extend to 24-48 hours. That delay can cause lost business. The customer wants to know the cost to move cargo from point A to point B, and the forwarder that responds first often has the edge.
Starboard connects to the inbox of a forwarder’s sales or pricing team. When a request for quote arrives, its AI agent reads the request, extracts the cargo and routing details, splits the job into legs, searches contract and spot rates, and can contact agents or co-loaders for missing information. The company says users have cut response times from a day or two to roughly one or two hours in many cases.
Trehan argues the advantage is not just speed. Forwarders often get rates from many sources in different formats. A human might rely on memory, assuming yesterday’s best option is still today’s best option. In volatile markets, that assumption can be costly. He said the goal is not only to quote quickly but also to always quote at the cheapest and best rate available to customers.
The industry’s data problem is long-standing. Freight has spent decades trying to digitize around documents and messages that rarely align neatly between parties. Electronic data interchange may be common, but standardization remains inconsistent. Trehan sees AI as valuable because it can convert messy inputs into structured data that systems can use, without requiring forwarders to replace every legacy system first.
He is also wary of AI hype. Starboard spent over two years working with about 25 design partners in the US and Canada to train its agents on real quoting workflows. He said that while one can show magic in a demo, actually having something that can begin replacing human work takes years of effort. For forwarders evaluating AI, Trehan’s advice is to start with the business problem, not the technology. Faster quote turnaround, better win rates, higher profitability per quote, and less manual work are measurable. A vague AI pilot is not.
Trehan said customers have typically seen air quote response times drop to about an hour and ocean quotes to two or three hours. He also claimed average quoted rates can fall by around 5% when the system finds better options within the forwarder’s own rate sources. Starboard does not name those customers publicly, citing confidentiality agreements. His final advice is to choose the partner carefully. He noted that at this stage the technology is so nascent and early that one needs to invest in the team over the brand or the company. For smaller forwarders, the useful AI story may not be a future where the local operator disappears, but one where the operator responds faster and prices more intelligently.
https://www.indexbox.io/blog/ai-in-freight-forwarding-starboards-approach-to-smarter-quoting/
