Thursday, October 29, 2026
The news that moves freight
Tech & AI Oct 29, 2026 · 8 min read

AI takes the inbox, not the price: air cargo digitisation at TIACA Miami

Air cargo AI is clearing inboxes. Prices are still set by hand. About 90% of priced air cargo searches on CargoAi are still quoted to shippers manually, the booking platform said at TIACA’s Air Cargo Forum in Miami, STAT Times reported on 28 October. In our view, AI has won the inbox but not the price. Its email agent handled 105,000 airline customer emails in 2026, 25,000 of them in October. The day before, Miami International launched a shared cargo portal for truck scheduling, with no rollout dates. Forwarders who automate quote replies now will answer faster. Our call: CargoAi’s manual-quote share stays above 75% through end-2027.

Air cargo’s AI has learned to read. It has not learned to price. About 90% of priced searches on CargoAi are still quoted to shippers by a person. CargoAi, an online air cargo booking platform, published that figure this week at TIACA’s Air Cargo Forum in Miami, STAT Times reported on 28 October. The figure came out alongside some of the biggest usage numbers yet published for AI agents in air freight.

A day earlier, at the same event, Miami International Airport (MIA) launched a shared digital portal for everyone who moves cargo through it.

Taken together, the two announcements show where air cargo digitisation actually stands at the end of 2026. Our view is simple. AI has won the inbox, meaning the reading, sorting and answering of routine emails. It has not won the price. For most forwarders, the decision on what margin to put on an air rate is still made by a person, and that will not change quickly.

What CargoAi’s numbers show

CargoAi founder and chief executive Matt Petot presented the figures at the CargoTech press conference in Miami. The company started building its platform in 2019. Its AI agent has handled live requests for two years.

On quote intake, the AI read 446,000 shipment requests in two years, averaging 1.6 seconds each, STAT Times reported. CargoAi estimates this saved 37,000 hours of manual data entry. By our arithmetic, that is about five minutes of retyping saved per request.

On airline mailboxes, its email agent, AirAgent, handled 105,000 airline customer emails in 2026, including 25,000 in October. About 70% were rate, tracking or booking enquiries. CargoAi estimates 6,100 working hours saved so far this year. For a top-10 airline handling two million emails a year, it puts the possible saving at about 117,000 hours.

Usage is speeding up. October’s 25,000 emails are close to a quarter of the year’s total, with the month not yet over when the figures were given. “AI-drafted answers” rose ninefold in October compared with September, according to the company, as some customers moved from having AI read and sort emails to having it write the replies.

The network is wide. In the past 12 months, 6,935 freight forwarders searched for live rates through CargoAi, connected to 209 airlines, with tracking across more than 260 airlines.

Then comes the pricing number. Forwarders generated 400,000 quotations through the platform in 2026. Yet “Around 90% of priced searches on CargoAi are still quoted to shippers manually,” STAT Times wrote. CargoAi estimates 87,000 working hours could be saved by automating that step. That works out to roughly 13 minutes per quote, by our arithmetic.

Petot framed the pitch as time, not speed. “The real value of AI in air cargo is not simply in answering questions faster. It is in removing people’s workload,” he said, as quoted by Air Cargo Week. He also said: “People should work on the shipment, not on the inbox.”

Why the price is the last thing to go

The airline rate is now easy to get. A forwarder can search live rates across 209 carriers in seconds. The hard part is the sell rate, the price the forwarder quotes its own customer.

That number carries judgment. It reflects the customer’s history, the margin the branch needs, whether space is tight that week, and how badly the sales team wants the deal. A pricing desk does not like handing that to software it cannot see inside. That is our reading of why 90% of priced searches still go out by hand, even on a platform built to automate them.

Some big users are pushing further. Flexport connects to CargoAi through its application programming interfaces (APIs, the plumbing that lets two systems swap data) and its “MCP Connector”, a standard way to plug AI agents into outside data. STRACKER uses the MCP Connector. “With CargoAi’s MCP Connector, our AI agents turn airline data into ready-to-send quotations within minutes, instead of hours,” said Carole Longe, product manager at STRACKER, as quoted by Air Cargo Week. Alexis Boutet, Flexport’s VP and global head of airfreight, said the forwarder uses AI agents “to find the lowest-cost, most reliable options.”

Those are the early movers. The 90% figure says the rest of the market is not there yet.

CargoAi’s own targets point the same way. It says its agents can free up to 60% of a sales desk’s quote-intake time, up to 70% of a customer-service agent’s mailbox time, and up to 80% of a pricing desk’s quoting time, Air Cargo Week reported. These are vendor estimates, not audited results. Still, the gap between “up to 80%” possible on pricing and 10% actually automated is the most useful number in the release.

Miami’s portal: what it is and what is missing

MIA’s new Airport Cargo Community System was built by Kalé Logistics. A cargo community system is one shared online platform where forwarders, ground handlers (the firms that run the airport warehouses where freight is accepted and released), truckers, airlines and authorities exchange information instead of using phone calls, emails and paper.

The launch was announced at the TIACA forum on 27 October, Air Cargo News reported. Kalé says the platform will improve information sharing, advance planning and truck scheduling. It also says trucks currently arrive at MIA with limited information about arrival times and cargo types, which adds to congestion and emissions. The system is also meant to link MIA digitally with partner airports abroad.

The scale is large. MIA handled 3.1m tonnes of cargo in 2025, up 13.6%, according to Airports Council International figures cited by Air Cargo News. Kalé says the hub averages 190 cargo-only flights and more than 1,600 truck trips a day.

Kalé estimates that if the whole MIA cargo operation adopted the system, it could save up to $250m a year in operating costs, plus 5,900 US tons of CO2. That assumes a 15% saving in paper handling and an average two hours saved per truck turnaround. By our arithmetic, $250m across 1,600 daily truck trips is roughly $430 per trip. That is an estimate built on assumptions, not a measured result.

Two things are missing. Neither Air Cargo News nor STAT Times gives a rollout schedule. Neither says whether forwarders, truckers or handlers will be required to use it. Without a requirement, a shared portal only works as well as its least willing user.

Miami-Dade County mayor Daniella Levine Cava said: “Most importantly, this is about making MIA more future-ready”. Kalé co-founder and chief executive Amar More said: “Small inefficiencies can quickly grow in scale”. Both quotes are from Air Cargo News.

What happened last time

Truck queues at MIA are not a new complaint. In January 2026, the Airforwarders Association (AfA) said it would back the newly formed Miami Air Cargo Association. AfA executive director Brandon Fried said: “Working together, we will press for solutions to tackle truck congestion”. Air Cargo Week and CargoForwarder Global both reported it. Neither report gave wait-time figures.

Kalé has done this before in the US. In a pilot at New York’s JFK airport with ground handler Worldwide Flight Services (WFS), starting in December 2021, Kalé’s truck slot and dock module cut truck wait times “by up to 66 percent for exports and 48 percent for imports,” Cargo Newswire reported in March 2022. About 50 organisations and more than 160 users took part. A WFS vice-president said then: “we will soon be rolling this out across all our facilities in JFK and other stations in North America.”

The lesson for Miami is that the gains came handler by handler, starting with one warehouse operator at one airport. An airport-wide launch announcement is the start of that process, not the end.

What this means for forwarders

On quoting: the first win is speed of reply, not automated pricing. If a rival’s AI turns a request into a draft quote in minutes, a forwarder replying in hours loses the spot booking. Forwarders should automate intake now. That means reading the request, pulling the rates and drafting the reply, with a person still setting the margin. That is where the measured savings are today.

On airline relations: as more airline mailboxes are answered by AI, routine rate and tracking questions to carriers and general sales agents (GSAs, firms that sell an airline’s cargo space on its behalf) will get faster answers. Harder questions, such as special handling or capacity on a tight flight, will still need a named contact. Keep those relationships.

On Miami: expect handlers at MIA to start asking for advance shipment details and booked truck slots, warehouse by warehouse. Forwarders and their truckers serving Latin America through Miami should register on the portal early and check which handlers are live before promising pickup times to customers. Where a handler is live, a truck without a slot may wait behind one that has booked.

On cost: if Kalé’s two-hour turnaround saving even partly holds, the trucking cost of a Miami pickup should fall over time. We would not pass that saving on in rates until it shows up in real driver hours.

Our call

We predict CargoAi’s share of priced searches quoted manually will stay above 75% through the end of 2027. Intake and email will keep automating fast. Pricing will move slowly, because it is where the margin lives.

For Miami, we predict MIA or Kalé will name the first ground handlers live on truck scheduling by the end of Q1 2027. We do not expect booked truck slots to become mandatory across the whole airport during 2027.

Sources