Tech & AI Oct 13, 2026 · 7 min read

AI agents are moving into trucking data and forwarder booking desks

Your next customer may book through ChatGPT, not your portal. Samsara says its latest 500,000 AI agent sessions took 16 days, against 112 days for the first 500,000 after its June launch. More than 1,000 organisations use its agents weekly. On 12 October, forwarder Freight Right Global Logistics let shippers quote, track and start bookings from inside ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot. Our view: the AI assistant is becoming a freight sales channel. Forwarders with no machine connection to it will simply not appear. Our prediction: by the end of March 2027, at least two of the ten largest global forwarders will announce a similar assistant connection.

Freight is being wired into AI assistants, and forwarders who stay offline will not be found
Samsara, the fleet telematics company, opened its AI agent builder to every customer on 13 October. Telematics means the devices and software that track trucks, drivers and engines. Samsara says agent use is now running about seven times faster than when the tool launched in June. Its latest 500,000 agent sessions took 16 days to pile up. The first 500,000 took 112. More than 1,000 organisations now use its agents every week, FreightWaves reported.
On the same day, fleet-safety firm Netradyne widened its own agent line-up. A day earlier, the forwarder Freight Right Global Logistics put its quoting, tracking and booking inside ChatGPT, Claude and Microsoft Copilot.
Our view: this is the week the AI assistant started to look like a freight sales channel. The software on a shipper’s desk is learning to reach carriers’ and forwarders’ systems directly. Forwarders whose rates and bookings it cannot reach will not be in the conversation at all. That is a bigger change than any single chatbot launch, and it is arriving through trucking data first.

What actually launched

Samsara’s tool is called Agent Studio. It lets fleet managers build AI agents without writing code. An agent here is software that can take steps on its own, such as calling a driver, flagging a problem or writing a report, rather than just answering a question. Samsara includes it in existing subscriptions.
FreightWaves reported that Samsara counts an “interaction” as a full agent session by chat or voice. Voice agents overtook chat in volume within four weeks of launch and have led every week since. But most of those voice sessions are calls the agent makes, set up by the customer, not drivers ringing in.
Samsara also gave customer results. Grand Isle Shipyard cut report time by 99%, to about five minutes per division. S. Bertram Foods cut weekly manual review time by 84%, with an agent flagging possible hours-of-service breaches three hours ahead. Hours-of-service rules cap how long a truck driver can work. StreamTech Industrial cut unassigned driving by 500 hours over two months.
“AI is quickly adopted when it’s useful, and in physical operations that means an agent has to understand the operation,” said Johan Land, Samsara’s chief product officer.
Netradyne’s update adds a Campaign Agent that runs driver-safety competitions, scoring drivers and posting daily standings. It also adds a builder where managers describe a custom agent in plain language. It is available to direct customers in the US and Canada. Netradyne says its platform rests on more than 30 billion miles of driving data. “The impact is already clear: customers created more than 250 agents within a month of release,” said chief executive Avneesh Agrawal.

The plumbing that matters: MCP

The common thread is 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, an MCP connection lets an assistant such as ChatGPT or Claude look things up in, and act inside, a company’s own system.
Samsara’s MCP link connects authorised fleet data to ChatGPT, Claude and Microsoft Copilot, according to FreightWaves. Netradyne added an MCP connector in August that brings fleet insights into ChatGPT and Claude.
Freight Right went further, because it is a forwarder, not a software vendor. Its press release, published on The Loadstar and dated 12 October, says shippers can use its MCP connection to:

check lane costs and get pricing in conversation

upload packing lists, invoices or purchase orders to build a quote

track shipments and check customs status

ask an assistant to watch a shipment and flag problems, such as a missed customs deadline

prepare bookings, which the customer then confirms with Freight Right

It covers ocean, air and ground. It works from ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Grok and Muse.
“The shift happening with AI assistants is that the software increasingly comes to the user,” said chief executive Robert Khachatryan. “Our objective is not to build another chatbot or another portal.”
That second line is the point. Digital forwarding has long meant getting shippers to log into your portal. The bet here is the reverse: go to where the shipper already works.

Why we are not getting carried away

The numbers so far measure use, not profit. FreightWaves was clear on this. Samsara did not say how many customers run agents in live operations, or how many have built custom agents. It did not publish how it measured all of its customer results. Its estimate that one customer freed about $100,000 a year in specialist time came without a calculation. Netradyne’s 250 agents is its own count.
The wider surveys are sobering. FreightWaves cited a March 2026 BCG survey of more than 180 logistics providers and shippers. About 40% of logistics providers had deployed AI beyond pilots. About 10% had scaled it across core operations. Only 13% reported measurable value. A September 2026 Descartes survey found 19% of shippers and 15% of logistics providers using AI at scale.
Freight Right gave no pricing, no volumes and no customer count. Its release is a release.
Erik Muttersbach, founder of AI software firm Zauber, framed the timing on The Loadstar’s podcast this week. He said 2025 was the year of AI start-ups and funding, and 2026 has been the year of pilots and proofs of concept. He expects the first results to show in forwarders’ financial reporting next year, in EBIT (operating profit), volumes and customer retention. He urged forwarders to aim AI at profitability, not just productivity, for example by charging for waiting time they now absorb and handling demurrage and detention better. Demurrage and detention are the charges for keeping containers too long at the port or away from it.

What happened last time

There is one clear precedent for AI paying off at a big freight intermediary. In April 2025, FreightWaves reported that C.H. Robinson’s AI agents had handled more than 3 million shipping tasks, including more than 1 million price quotes and 1 million orders. More than 5,200 customers were getting loads accepted in under 90 seconds, instead of waiting up to four hours. Investors were not convinced at first. FreightWaves noted the stock had fallen nearly 6% after the previous earnings report.
Then the results caught up. On 30 October 2025, Transport Topics, carrying a Bloomberg report, said C.H. Robinson shares rose more than 20% intraday, the biggest gain since 2007, after it beat third-quarter forecasts and raised its 2026 operating income outlook. “The company continues an impressive demonstration of actually leveraging AI,” Barclays analyst Brandon Oglenski wrote.
The lesson we take: in freight, AI got rewarded when it showed up in quote speed and operating income, not in demo counts. Samsara’s 16-day figure is a usage signal. The test is whether it shows up in fewer missed appointments and lower costs for the fleets using it.

What this means for forwarders

First, your trucking partners’ data is about to become easier to query. If a carrier runs Samsara or Netradyne, hours-of-service risk, arrival times and safety records can now flow into an assistant through MCP. Forwarders and brokers who vet carriers or chase ETAs (estimated times of arrival) should ask their trucking partners whether they can share that feed. It could replace a lot of “where is my truck” calls.
Second, the sales front door is moving. If a shipper’s procurement team starts asking Copilot or ChatGPT to “price 2 x 40ft Shanghai to Rotterdam”, the assistant can only quote forwarders it can reach. Freight Right is a single forwarder, but the pattern is easy to copy. Forwarders that rely on email quoting and a login portal risk being left off the shortlist without ever knowing.
Third, readiness is mostly unglamorous. To be reachable you need clean rate data, a working API, clear booking rules and a human check before anything is committed. Freight Right keeps the final booking confirmation with its own staff. That is a sensible guardrail, given that an assistant misreading a packing list can produce a wrong quote at speed.
Fourth, follow Muttersbach’s advice on where to point it. The quick win is not cutting staff. It is billing for work you already do for free, such as waiting time, and handling demurrage and detention cases better.

Our call

We expect the largest forwarders to follow. Our prediction: by the end of March 2027, at least two of the ten largest global forwarders will announce an MCP or similar connection that lets shippers get quotes or start bookings from a general AI assistant. We also expect Samsara or Netradyne to name a freight broker or forwarder as an MCP data partner by the end of Q1 2027. If neither happens, the “assistant as sales channel” idea is further off than this week’s launches suggest.

Sources