Carriers want the tracking bots off the phone

Bot-to-bot freight tracking has arrived, and carriers are sending the bill back
On Wednesday 14 October 2026, two software firms gave a name to a problem many carrier service desks already know. Carrier Logistics (CLI), which makes freight management software for LTL fleets, announced a collaboration with LSP44, an AI agent and API company. The name they used was “AI bot fatigue”.
LTL means less-than-truckload. It is freight that shares a truck with other shippers’ freight. It is a high-volume, many-stop business, and every shipment can produce a stream of “where is it?” questions. CLI says it has served transportation companies for more than 50 years. The announcement came out of Elmsford, New York, where CLI is based, and a photo caption puts it at the Carrier Logistics Annual Users Conference.
The product is narrow. It is an AI-powered API that lets 3PLs (third-party logistics providers) and shippers find a carrier’s shipment without a known tracking number.
Our view: this is less about a new feature and more about who pays for automation. Forwarders and brokers have been deploying AI agents that chase carriers by email and phone. Those messages cost the sender almost nothing. They cost the carrier staff time. This launch packages a carrier-side product around pushing back. We think more will follow, and that the email inbox will stop being a free tracking channel for bots.

What the new tool actually does

A tracking API is a direct link between two computer systems. The sender asks for a shipment by its number, and the carrier’s system answers. It works well when the number is right.
The release says the trouble starts when tracking numbers are missing or incorrect. The API call fails. The bot on the other end does not give up. It sends an email, or places a call, to the carrier’s customer service team. Multiply that across thousands of loads and many customers, and a service desk spends its day answering machines.
The CLI and LSP44 tool tries to close that gap. Instead of needing an exact number, the AI matches the shipment properties the requester does know against records in the carrier’s TMS. A TMS, or transport management system, is the software that runs a carrier’s bookings, dispatch and billing. If the match works, the requester gets a structured API answer. Nobody needs to email anyone.
The companies say this cuts manual queries and improves data accuracy as the number of touchless shipments grows. Touchless here means loads that move from booking to delivery without a person touching the paperwork.
Ben Wiesen, president of Carrier Logistics, put it this way: “CLI and LSP44 are collaborating to solve AI bot fatigue.” Nick Ruggiero, head of product at LSP44, said: “The industry has treated manual tracking requests as the cost of doing business for decades.” He added that API connectivity that “works without a clean tracking number removes an entire category of friction overnight”.
The release gives no figures on how many bot requests carriers receive, how many the tool resolves, or what it costs. That is a gap. Treat the scale of the problem as the companies’ description, not a measured number.

The vendor on both sides of the bot war

The more interesting detail is who CLI picked as its partner.
LSP44 is three months old as a separate business. On 14 July 2026, project44 split itself in two, FreightWaves and DC Velocity reported. project44 kept enterprise shippers. LSP44 took logistics service providers: brokers, forwarders and 3PLs. Jett McCandless is founder and CEO of both. “Shippers and LSPs don’t buy the same thing, so we stopped pretending one business could serve both,” he said in a release quoted by DC Velocity.
According to FreightWaves, LSP44’s library of prebuilt agents covers “everything from confirming ETAs and collecting reason codes” to “onboarding new carriers and collecting missing delivery milestones.” Those are exactly the jobs that send automated questions to carriers. The company also claims “60%+ reduction in “where is my shipment” calls” from its visibility agents. That figure comes from the company and has no named customer or method behind it.
FreightWaves also reported McCandless’s claim that “nine of the ten largest logistics service providers in the world now run on what will become LSP44 infrastructure.” It says the data network covers “over 280,000 carriers, 1.5 billion shipments and 706 million carrier events processed every day”. Those are company figures.
There is some history here. DC Velocity reported that project44’s first product, launched in 2014, was a real-time API for LSPs working in the LTL market. “We started in 2014 serving the brokers, forwarders, and 3PLs who took the first bet on us,” McCandless said. He called LSP44 “us coming home”. In other words, the problem CLI is now trying to fix, getting clean LTL status data to the people who book the freight, is the same one project44 was founded on twelve years ago. The difference is that the requesters are now increasingly machines, and machines do not get tired of asking.
So LSP44 sells agents that chase carriers for forwarders, and now helps a carrier software vendor answer those agents more cheaply. We do not think that is a contradiction. It is the logical end point. If one company sits on both ends of the conversation, it can turn messy emails into clean API calls in both directions. That also makes it a toll booth between forwarders and carriers. Forwarders should notice that.

How far AI agents have spread

The wider adoption picture is mixed, and useful as a reality check.
On 13 October, FreightWaves reported that Samsara, a fleet software company whose voice agents run through its dash cams, made its no-code Agent Studio generally available at no extra cost within existing subscriptions. Samsara says agent interactions are growing about seven times faster than when it launched the tools in June. The latest 500,000 interactions took 16 days, against 112 days for the first 500,000. It says more than 1,000 organizations use its agents every week. “AI is quickly adopted when it’s useful, and in physical operations that means an agent has to understand the operation and meet people where the work happens,” said Johan Land, Samsara’s chief product officer.
The same FreightWaves piece cited two surveys. Boston Consulting Group found in March 2026 that about 40% of logistics service providers had deployed AI beyond pilots. Only about 10% had scaled it across core operations. Across the more than 180 providers and shippers surveyed, just 13% reported measurable value. A Descartes survey in September 2026 found 19% of shippers and 15% of logistics service providers using AI at scale.
Read together, that points one way. Agents are spreading fast on the carrier side as well as the forwarder side. Most firms are still not getting proven value. The cheapest wins, like automated status chasing, are where agents land first. That is why carriers feel it first.

What it means for forwarders

Our view is that forwarders should plan for three changes.
First, the email and phone fallback will get worse for bots. Carriers that can match a load without a tracking number through an API have every reason to route automated traffic there. Expect slower replies to bot emails, then auto-replies pointing to a portal or API, then outright filtering.
Second, data quality becomes the forwarder’s problem. The whole issue starts with missing or wrong tracking numbers. In LTL, the tracking number is usually the PRO number (the carrier’s shipment ID), and it may never make it back to the forwarder’s system. The forwarder that captures the PRO at booking will need fewer fuzzy lookups and will get cleaner answers.
Third, the toll booth question. If tracking moves to APIs run by a handful of platforms, someone will charge for access. Today the carrier absorbs the cost of answering emails. Tomorrow, the forwarder or its software vendor may pay per lookup. Forwarders should ask their visibility and TMS vendors now which carriers they connect to directly, and what it costs.
For shippers, the effect is mostly positive. Fewer lost emails and more structured status data should mean better ETAs. The risk is the same as for forwarders: dependence on one platform for visibility.
We expect the pressure to show first in LTL, where shipment counts are high and where CLI’s customers operate. We expect truckload and ocean to follow more slowly.

Our call

We think carriers will stop treating bot traffic as free. Our prediction: by the end of Q1 2027, at least one large US LTL carrier will publicly tell customers that automated tracking requests must come through an API or portal, not email or phone. We also expect at least one more carrier software vendor to announce a similar bot-handling tool within six months.
Forwarders running tracking agents should get direct API access to their top LTL carriers sorted before then.

Sources

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• PR Newswire — Carrier Logistics and LSP44 Join Forces to Solve AI Bot Fatigue, 14 Oct 2026 \
• FreightWaves — Project44 forms two new businesses, launches AI-native LSP44, 14 Jul 2026 \
• DC Velocity — Project44 splits its shipment visibility tech into two businesses, 14 Jul 2026 \
• FreightWaves — Samsara makes AI agent platform generally available, reports 7x adoption growth, 13 Oct 2026