Tech & AI Oct 10, 2026 · 7 min read

WiseTech will charge separately for CargoWise AI agents

WiseTech plans to bill CargoWise AI agents outside the Value Pack price. WiseTech will charge for its CargoWise AI agents separately from its Value Pack fee, according to a 1 October Citi note reported by The Loadstar. Citi reckons more than $30m of the extra second-half revenue CargoWise needs to reach the low end of its guidance has to come from those agents and VerifyWise. Our view: the single-price pitch has a gap, and forwarders should close it in writing now. CEO Zubin Appoo says six agents sit inside Value Packs today but won’t say what comes next. We expect WiseTech to name its first paid agent by its half-year results early next year.

WiseTech plans to charge for CargoWise AI agents outside the Value Pack price
WiseTech Global plans to charge for its CargoWise AI agents separately from its Value Pack fee. That is according to a 1 October research note from Citi, reported by The Loadstar on 8 October. Citi described the plan as “monetising the AI agents separately from the CVP”, the CargoWise Value Pack.
The bank also put a number on what is at stake. Once price rises and contract conversions are counted, Citi estimates that more than $30m of the extra second-half revenue CargoWise needs to reach the low end of its growth guidance must come from AI agents and VerifyWise. It questioned whether that can happen quickly, given the agents are still in development.
WiseTech has not said which future capabilities will cost extra, how they will be priced, or when charging would start.
Our view is simple. The Value Pack was sold as one price. It was always going to be one price for what exists today. WiseTech’s growth targets now depend on charging for what comes next, and forwarders should plan on paying for it.

What a Value Pack is, and what changed

CargoWise is the freight software that many large and mid-size forwarders run their operations on. Bookings, customs filings, invoicing and tracking all sit in it.
In December 2025, WiseTech launched what it calls its new commercial model, the CargoWise Value Packs, according to its FY26 results release. The old model charged mainly for user seats and cloud services. The new one charges per transaction. In a 3 September interview with The Loadstar, CEO Zubin Appoo said: “We decided we would charge between $2.63 and $19.95 per job, depending on the permutation or type of shipment.”
The Loadstar says WiseTech’s earlier public description of Value Packs stressed a single, all-inclusive transaction price that covered core and many extended capabilities. That description did not promise that every future agent would be included. The Value Pack page also carries a list of products billed separately, according to The Loadstar. AI agents are not on it.
That is the seam. A forwarder reading the pitch could fairly assume new AI features would arrive inside the price. Citi’s note suggests otherwise.

What WiseTech says

Appoo neither confirmed nor ruled out separate charges. He told The Loadstar: “Six powerful agentic capabilities are currently available to customers through CargoWise Value Packs.” He added: “Use of those capabilities has increased substantially since initial launch in December 2025.”
An agent, in this context, is software that does a piece of work on its own rather than waiting for a person to click through it. One example WiseTech has named is its Smart Auto Request Agent, or SARA. It spots missing or unreadable data in a shipment and asks the customer for it. “The smart auto request agent takes humans out of that process entirely,” Appoo told The Loadstar in September.
On future pricing, Appoo chose his words carefully. “Any decisions in this area will be guided by the customer outcomes achieved, and the value delivered,” he said. He also said: “We continue to add capabilities to the CargoWise Value Packs.” And: “We will provide further details on future offerings when they are ready to be brought to market.”
Read together, that is a company keeping its options open. The current six agents stay in the price. Anything more advanced is unpriced, not promised.
An unnamed industry source told The Loadstar: “Customers should be aware that future agents may not be included in current costing.”

Why the numbers point to a charge

The strongest case for separate pricing comes from WiseTech’s own guidance, published on 26 August.
CargoWise revenue grew 11% in FY26 to $756.9m, according to the FY26 results release. For FY27, WiseTech’s results presentation guides to “~12-20% growth” for CargoWise. It expects a 45/55 split between the first and second half “due to timing of new products, AI features and expected adoption”.
Our rough arithmetic: 12% growth on $756.9m is about $848m for the year. On a 45/55 split, roughly $466m of that would need to land in the second half. Citi’s point is that more than $30m of the gap has to be filled by products that are not yet fully on the market.
Other levers are thinning out. WiseTech says over 95% of CargoWise customers have already moved onto Value Packs. That leaves few conversions from the old licence model still to come. Price rises help, but WiseTech already had to pull back once. In the second half of FY26 it refined the Value Pack model after customer feedback. Appoo told The Loadstar in September that there were cases of “capturing value too early”, and the changes lowered second-half revenue growth.
The guidance itself leans on AI. The FY26 presentation lists “further delivery and adoption of agentic AI in CargoWise” as a driver of the range. It talks of “monetization opportunities as efficiencies are delivered to customers”. Appoo, in the results briefing, said: “We share in efficiency gains that AI unlock for our customers.” WiseTech says its AI capabilities are targeted to deliver up to about 50% labour cost savings for forwarders.
If WiseTech is sharing in savings, it needs a way to bill for them. Per-job fees on agents that already ship inside the pack do not obviously do that. A separate charge on new agents does.

What happened last time pricing moved

This is not the first time CargoWise customers have had to adjust to a pricing change. The move to Value Packs changed bills unevenly. According to The Loadstar’s September interview, some customers pay about the same, while others pay more or less, depending on how many seats they used against how much volume they ran.
WiseTech then changed the model again within months. That matters. It shows customer pushback can work, but only after the bills arrive.
The backdrop is also less comfortable for WiseTech than a year ago. On 19 August, Australia’s competition regulator, the ACCC, executed a search warrant at WiseTech as part of an investigation, according to The Loadstar. Asked by The Loadstar what conduct was under investigation, Appoo declined to say. The ACCC has previously said WiseTech has “substantial market power” in logistics software.
Rivals are circling the AI layer too. In July, Project44 chief executive Jett McCandless told The Loadstar that some forwarders are building their own AI application layers to work around CargoWise. “To me, it looks a pretty dangerous trend for CargoWise,” he said. He is a competitor, so treat that as a pitch as much as a forecast. But it shows where the fight is.

What it means for forwarders and shippers

For forwarders, the immediate issue is budget. Many teams sized their Value Pack spend on the basis of one per-job rate. If the agents they most want, such as automatic job creation from documents or customs classification, arrive as paid extras, the cost of automation goes up just as they are counting on it to cut labour costs.
Some practical steps follow from that. We think forwarders on renewal or migration should ask, in writing, which agents are included for the term of the contract. They should ask how any future agent would be priced: per job, per use, or as a share of savings. And they should push for a cap or a right to opt out.
Large forwarders have the most leverage. DSV has held talks with WiseTech about moving onto Value Packs before its contract ends in September 2028, according to The Loadstar. Deals like that will set the template for how agents are priced for everyone else.
Smaller forwarders have less leverage, but they have alternatives at the edges. Visibility, document capture and carrier connectivity tools from third parties will look more attractive if CargoWise agents carry a separate fee.
For shippers, the effect is indirect but real. Forwarders pass software costs into handling and documentation fees. If agent charges land, expect them to show up in those lines rather than in ocean or air rates. On the other side, if the agents deliver the labour savings WiseTech is targeting, forwarders that adopt them early may be able to quote more sharply on high-volume lanes where paperwork is the main cost, such as transpacific and Asia–Europe LCL.

Our call

WiseTech needs AI revenue in the second half of FY27, which runs from January to June 2027. It has two agents it describes as “imminent”, plus an auto job creation agent in the pipeline, according to The Loadstar’s September interview.
We expect WiseTech to put a separate price on at least one new CargoWise agent before it reports first-half FY27 results early in 2027. Its AGM on 27 November is the first likely moment for more detail. We also expect the first agent fees to be tied to transactions or usage, not a flat subscription, because that matches how Value Packs already bill. Forwarders who lock in agent terms before then will be in a better position than those who wait for the invoice.

Sources