By building its own proprietary AI infrastructure and control tower, fleet operator Load One has successfully automated critical logistics workflows, dramatically accelerating quote times and scaling operations without sacrificing oversight.
- In-House Innovation: Load One developed six proprietary AI agents and a centralized AI Control Tower entirely in-house, avoiding off-the-shelf software to tailor tools specifically for expedited freight.
- Lightning-Fast Quoting: The AI reads customer email requests via large language models, analyzes market capacity, and generates quotes in just two seconds.
- Streamlined Operations: Custom agents automate complex tasks like scanning delivery paperwork for billing compliance and placing outbound dispatch calls to drivers.
- Human-in-the-Loop Philosophy: The technology is designed to empower staff rather than replace them, reallocating human capital from routine tasks to high-value problem-solving and strategic oversight.
In the fast-paced, high-stakes world of time-critical expedited trucking, speed is everything and if artificial intelligence is good at anything, it's increasing speed and efficiency.
Taylor, Michigan-based expeditor Load One (CCJ Top 250, No. 148), a new suite of custom-built artificial intelligence agents is shaving quote response times down from minutes to mere seconds while completely transforming its internal workflows.
Load One has spent the past several months building, testing, and deploying its own in-house artificial intelligence ecosystem, anchored by a centralized management interface it calls the AI Control Tower.
How it works and what it does
At the core of Load One’s technological push are seven proprietary AI agents integrated directly into the company’s operations, handling everything from quoting and billing compliance to load tracking and driver dispatch.
"We designed what we call our AI control tower, which is a consolidated view of kind of what agents are doing at any given time anywhere in the business," explained Chad Tabor, president of Load One. "It's just one screen that a human can watch because we believe strongly that AI is beneficial with human in the loop because you obviously don't just want to let it run and do its own thing without kind of quality analysis."
The process begins in the company's email systems. When a customer sends a rate request, an AI-powered agent instantly reads the message using a large language model.
"It learns. So it can detect and it can understand the difference between someone saying, 'I need to move a Sprinter van from here to there,' versus someone asking for an update on a Sprinter van that's already moving," Tabor noted.
Once extracted, the system interfaces with Load One’s proprietary transportation management system (TMS), Transcend, to evaluate available asset capacity, external partner carrier bids, and market density. Within roughly two seconds, the AI calculates a competitive rate and automatically responds to the customer.
"When it was all human interaction, that can range from, call it 5 minutes to 20 minutes," Tabor said. "In expedited, usually he who has the quickest solution wins just because they need that load moved."
Early in the tool's development, an AI might look at a shipment of just two pallets weighing 2,500 pounds and correctly recognize that it physically fits inside a Sprinter van, but Tabor noted that the system also relies on predefined rules and continuous human-in-the-loop quality analysis to ensure the load is assigned to the correct equipment type.
If a customer requests a straight truck, for example, a feedback loop established by human supervisors, and an ongoing AI training process, ensures the AI understands context of the quote, like whether a load requires a dock-height unit rather than just evaluating physical weight and pallet count alone.
Once a quote is built and a truck is available, a driver offer phone agent calls the driver, walks them through the load details, answers questions on the lane, timing and pay, and captures the accept or decline.
Improving workflows and scaling operations
The introduction of the AI tools has done more than hasten bid response. It's also improved operational efficiency across administrative and communication workflows. Tabor said as of late October the company's AI agents were performing roughly 3,800 tasks every day that was being performed by a human earlier in the year.
An inbound check call agent monitors all loads in transit by reading incoming messages and updates within seconds to streamline communication. The outbound check call agent continuously tracks active loads, automatically triggering service exceptions for missed GPS updates and emailing drivers or partner carriers for status reports before updating the TMS.
The billing compliance agent processes invoices at scale by automatically reviewing delivery paperwork, bills of lading, and proof-of-delivery documents to ensure all details align. Tabor said the company's billing compliance agent can process roughly 275 invoices in 15 minutes.
A newly deployed load confirmation phone agent automates post-dispatch communication by calling drivers, reviewing load details, answering basic questions, and handling confirmations. Tabor noted that the first week of its launch, 1,381 dispatches were made through the calling agent, adding that the upcoming billing for those calls came out to just $131.49. "I would pay a human to make way more money to make that many phone calls," he said.
A customer payment risk agent monitors sales-side accounts to proactively flag payment term risks, missing invoices, or overdue accounts. The payment risk agent alerts the team before minor billing discrepancies spiral into credit issues, Tabor said, safeguarding cash flow in a volatile market.
Importantly, Tabor noted that the efficiencies gained and costs saved via AI tools are not a replacement for the company's human expertise, and emphasized a human-centric approach to automation. The automation only helps if an exception still lands with a person who can own the next decision for the customer, he added.
"We've got a lot of people who have a lot of knowledge about the business, and these agents still need a lot of oversight," Tabor said. "We're really wanting to protect our human capital and the AI is really just there to support them and allow the business to scale without us necessarily adding headcount."
How the Control Tower pulls it all together
The rapid acceleration of AI often brings its own challenges, namely bottlenecks from managing multiple automated tasks running simultaneously behind the scenes.
Acting a lot like an air traffic control center for freight, Load One's proprietary AI Control Tower provides managers with a single, consolidated dashboard view of what all AI agents are doing across the business at any given moment, allowing human supervisors to monitor activity without jumping between disparate systems and email threads.
Supervisors can generate instant AI-driven summaries of complex email threads with a single click, allowing them to grasp shipment statuses immediately without scrolling through long message histories.
Since AI moves faster than humans can naturally track, Tabor said the Control Tower also serves as a safety net, enabling human-in-the-loop oversight to spot misquotes, monitor capacity limits, and review confidence metrics before commitments are finalized with customers.
Building for the future
Load One launched its first AI agent in March and has continued to roll out new capabilities regularly and plans to end the year with nine. Because the company had already spent years developing its own TMS and software infrastructure, deploying custom AI solutions was streamlined, Tabor said.
"Leveraging AI to make your people more powerful is absolutely the future of the trucking industry," he said. "I don't think there's any secret to that. So I think the smart executives, they're figuring out how to do it."
