Tech & AI Oct 10, 2026 · 8 min read

Customers’ AI assistants can now book freight directly

Freight Right follows Flexport in letting customers’ AI assistants book freight. On 7 October, Freight Right, a California forwarder serving more than 180 countries, opened quoting, tracking and booking to customers’ AI assistants. That came eight days after Flexport did the same on 29 September. Our view: the booking screen is moving from the forwarder’s portal into the customer’s chatbot. Freight Right still makes the customer confirm each booking. A Loadstar comment says Flexport’s terms put a wrong booking’s cost on whoever connected the agent. We expect at least one top-ten global forwarder to offer the same by end of March 2027.

Two forwarders now let customers’ AI assistants book freight. The fine print decides who pays when it goes wrong
On 7 October, Freight Right Global Logistics, a California forwarder, opened its quoting, tracking and booking systems to customers’ AI assistants. A shipper can now ask a chatbot for a rate on a lane, compare the options and start a booking without opening Freight Right’s website. That came eight days after Flexport launched the same kind of connection on 29 September.
Our view: this is a distribution story first and an AI story second. The forwarders a customer’s assistant can reach are the ones it will compare.

What actually launched

Both companies use MCP, the Model Context Protocol. Anthropic introduced it in November 2024 and described it as “a new standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives.” In practice, it is a common plug. A company builds one MCP connection, and any assistant that speaks the protocol can use it. OpenAI adopted MCP in March 2025, according to Wikipedia. In December 2025 Anthropic handed it to a foundation run under the Linux Foundation. No single AI company controls it anymore.
Freight Right is not a household name. Founded in 2007, it is an FMC-licensed NVOCC, according to Splash247. That means it is registered with the US Federal Maritime Commission as a non-vessel operating common carrier: a forwarder that issues its own bills of lading without owning ships. It provides forwarding across more than 180 countries and already offered digital ocean booking and a rates API.
Its new connection covers ocean, air and road freight. According to Splash247, shippers can use it through tools including ChatGPT, Claude and Microsoft Copilot. For containers, a user can price a lane, compare options, check where a box is and move a rate towards booking. A customer can also upload a packing list, commercial invoice or purchase order. The system pulls out the dimensions, weight and commodity and builds a quote from them. On 8 October the company said its connector was now listed in Claude’s connector directory.
Flexport’s launch, reported by FreightWaves, goes further on one point. Shippers’ agents, including companies’ own in-house agents, can book against negotiated rates, the contract prices a shipper has already agreed, without logging into the Flexport platform. Flexport says more than 13,000 companies use it, and that its own AI agents already process 21 million tasks a year.

Why we think this matters

For decades a forwarder’s front door was a phone, then an email inbox, then a web portal. Each change moved some power. Portals rewarded forwarders with clean data and instant quotes. Forwarders who still quoted by email lost some spot business to them.
The next front door may be the customer’s own assistant. If a shipper’s procurement team asks its assistant to “find me the cheapest 40-foot box from Shanghai to Long Beach next week”, the assistant can only compare forwarders it can reach. A forwarder without a connection is not losing the comparison. It is not in it.
Freight Right’s chief executive, Robert Khachatryan, put the pitch plainly. “Artificial intelligence becomes more useful in logistics when it reduces administrative work,” he said in the launch release. A day later, announcing the Claude listing, he added: “Making Freight Right MCP publicly available means customers are not limited to a closed demo or proprietary interface.”
Flexport’s founder and chief executive, Ryan Petersen, went bigger. “The future of global logistics is autonomous,” he said, according to FreightWaves.
We would not go that far yet. What has launched is a new way to ask for a quote and start a booking. It is not autonomous logistics. Both launches keep people in the loop where it counts.

The confirmation step is the real product

Freight Right does not let the agent finish the job alone. “The customer confirms the request through Freight Right before the shipment is booked,” according to its release. Shipments that need manual pricing or an operational review go to Freight Right’s team through the same process. FreightWaves reports that Flexport, too, says exceptions still go to a human expert.
That is not caution for its own sake. It is where the legal risk sits.
In a comment piece in The Loadstar on 6 October, Adam Clermont asked who signs the contract when an agent books freight. His answer: US contract law and Flexport’s revised platform terms “put the bill for a wrong booking on whoever plugged the agent in.” In other words, if a shipper’s assistant books the wrong box, the wrong date or the wrong rate, the shipper is likely to pay. The forwarder is not.
That should shape how shippers use these tools. An assistant that misreads a purchase order and books 20 containers instead of two is not a hypothetical worth ignoring. It is the kind of mistake that a confirmation screen exists to catch.
The software itself carries a second risk. In April 2025, security researchers concluded there were “multiple outstanding security issues with MCP,” according to Wikipedia. Those included prompt injection, where hidden text in a document or web page tricks an assistant into doing something its user did not ask for. A freight booking tool that reads uploaded invoices is exactly the kind of system where that matters.
Incumbents are already selling the guardrails. On 6 October, at its Innovation Forum in Chicago, Descartes announced an “Agent Control Plane”. It runs on the Descartes Global Logistics Network, which Descartes uses to connect logistics businesses. It coordinates AI agents across applications and trading partners. Customers set the permissions and the approval points. It keeps a “traceable record of agent actions,” according to the company. It also makes Descartes agents available inside AI platforms customers already use.
Put together, the pattern is clear. The start-ups and mid-sized forwarders are opening the door. The incumbents are selling the lock and the logbook.

What happened last time

This is not the first time software promised to take the human out of freight booking.
Convoy, a Seattle digital freight broker, was valued at $2.75 billion in 2019, according to Wikipedia. It was a trucking broker built on its own software. In October 2023 it cancelled all shipments and shut down. Its chief executive blamed “a massive freight recession and a contraction in the capital markets.” Flexport bought its assets for $16 million in November 2023. In July 2025 DAT bought the Convoy platform from Flexport for $250 million.
The lesson is not that automated booking failed. The technology survived and found a buyer at many times the fire-sale price. What failed was a business that bet everything on it. We expect agent booking to follow the same path. The protocol will stay. Some of the launches built on it will not.
Analysts are sceptical too. In June 2025 Gartner predicted that over 40% of agentic AI projects would be cancelled by the end of 2027, because of cost, unclear value or weak risk controls. “Most agentic AI projects right now are early stage experiments or proof of concepts,” said Anushree Verma, a senior director analyst at Gartner. The same release forecast that at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions would be made autonomously through agentic AI by 2028, up from none in 2024.
Both things can be true. Most projects will be dropped, and the ones that survive will handle real work.

What forwarders and shippers should do now

For forwarders, three things follow, in our view.
First, the rate data has to be clean. An assistant cannot negotiate around a messy tariff sheet the way a sales rep can. If a forwarder’s rates live in spreadsheets and email threads, an MCP connection will expose that fast.
Second, the booking terms need updating. Flexport has already revised its terms, according to The Loadstar. Any forwarder that opens booking to agents needs to say plainly who is bound, when, and on whose confirmation.
Third, the confirmation step should stay. It protects the customer from its own assistant and the forwarder from disputes. It also gives the forwarder a last look at the cargo before committing space.
For shippers, the advice is simpler. Read the terms before connecting anything. Give the assistant limits, such as a ceiling on containers or spend per booking. Keep a person on the final click.
On lanes, we expect the first real use on high-volume, spot-heavy trades like the transpacific, where instant quotes already exist and the cargo is fairly standard. Project cargo, dangerous goods and anything needing a manual quote will stay with people for a long time. Freight Right’s own design already sends those to its team.

Our call

By the end of March 2027, at least one of the ten largest global forwarders will let customers’ AI assistants quote and start bookings through MCP or a similar connection. None of the launches in that period will let an agent bind a booking without a person confirming it. The first public dispute over an agent-made booking will be about who confirmed it, not about the AI.

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