Logistics
Handle Exceptions Before They Compound.
Documentation processing, exception handling and operational automation for operations where a delayed exception becomes an expensive one.
A shipment exception, from event to customer message
- 01Event
- 02Normalise
- 03Diagnose
- 04Evaluate against the SLA
- 05Remediate or raise
- 06Tell the customer
Challenges
What slows Logistics teams down
- Document-heavy processes across parties
- Exceptions discovered late
- Status enquiries consuming operational time
- Data spread across carrier and customer systems
- Overnight gaps
The workflow
A shipment exception, from event to customer message
An exception found at three in the morning costs a fraction of the same exception found at nine. Closing that window is the whole argument for this workflow.
| Stage | What happens | Systems | Who decides |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01Event | A scan is missing, a milestone passes late, a document is rejected, or a customer asks where something is. | TMS/WMS, carrier APIs, EDI, email | System |
| 02Normalise | Carrier feeds, EDI messages, portal data and PDFs arrive in different shapes and are mapped to one internal event before anything reasons about them. | Integration layer | System |
| 03Diagnose | Classified by cause — customs hold, capacity, address problem, documentation, damage — with the supporting evidence attached to the conclusion. | TMS, document store | System, confidence-scored |
| 04Evaluate against the SLA | Time remaining, the commitment given, the customer’s tier, and what your runbook says about this class of failure. | TMS, contract data | System |
| 05Remediate or raise | Known patterns are remediated against your runbook and verified. Novel failures go to on-call with the investigation already done. | TMS, carrier portals, on-call | System for known patterns; operator otherwise |
| 06Tell the customer | Before they ask — the cause, the revised expectation, and what is being done about it. | Email, customer portal, helpdesk | System |
Limits
Where errors cost, and where we would not automate
Both halves of this section are reasons to build less than the maximum. They are here because a supplier who has not thought about them has not built one of these before.
Where an error costs
- An exception found a day late has usually stopped being a routing problem and become a claim.
- A wrong diagnosis sends remediation down the wrong runbook and spends the time the automation was meant to save. That is why the run record shows what was retrieved and why the conclusion was reached.
- Extraction that writes a wrong weight, HS code or address through silently is worse than extraction that refuses. Low-confidence fields are surfaced, never defaulted.
Where we would not put AI here
- Customs classification and the content of a declaration. The system prepares and checks it; a licensed person signs it.
- Claims decisions and liability assessments.
- Committing to a revised delivery date the carrier has not actually given. Where the date is unknown, the message says the date is unknown.
Agents
The agents that do this work
Expand any card for the problem it solves, what it does, what it connects to and where a person stays in the loop.
Document Agent
Extracts, validates and processes business documents.
What it doesClose
- Problem
- Documents arrive in every format and someone retypes them into a system.
- Actions
- Classifies document type
- Extracts structured fields
- Validates against systems of record
- Flags discrepancies with both sources
- Files and posts
- Requests what is missing
- Integrations
- Email · SFTP · S3 · SharePoint · Accounting systems · ERP · Document stores
- Outcome
- Intake stops being manual, and exceptions surface with a diagnosis attached.
Operations Agent
Monitors workflows and initiates action when something needs attention.
What it doesClose
- Problem
- Problems are found when someone happens to look, which is usually after they matter.
- Actions
- Monitors defined signals
- Diagnoses against known patterns
- Applies documented remediations
- Raises incidents with diagnosis
- Notifies the right owner
- Tracks to resolution
- Integrations
- Monitoring platforms · Ticketing · Slack · Teams · Internal APIs · Databases
- Outcome
- Known issues are handled as they occur rather than discovered later.
Customer Support Agent
Handles repetitive support conversations and escalates the rest with context.
What it doesClose
- Problem
- A large share of tickets are the same handful of questions, and they sit in the same queue as the cases that genuinely need a specialist.
- Actions
- Answers from documentation and policy
- Retrieves account and order history
- Performs account actions within policy
- Escalates with a written summary
- Tags and routes
- Identifies documentation gaps
- Integrations
- Zendesk · Intercom · Freshdesk · Salesforce Service Cloud · Slack · Email
- Outcome
- Routine cases resolve without a queue; specialists receive pre-researched tickets.
Integrations
The systems this connects to
- TMS/WMS platforms
- Carrier APIs
- EDI
- ERP
- Data warehouses
Selected work
Results, once they are checkable
Selected work is being prepared for publication.
We publish results only once they can be independently verified.
FAQ
Logistics questions we are asked
Our documents arrive in every format imaginable. Does that matter?
It is the normal case rather than the exception, and it is why this is a retrieval and extraction problem rather than a template problem. Extraction is built against the variety you actually receive, and low-confidence extractions are surfaced for review instead of written through silently.
How does it integrate with carrier systems?
Through whatever each carrier exposes — API, EDI, a portal feed or email. The integration layer normalises them into one internal shape, so the exception logic is written once rather than once per carrier.
Who decides how an exception is routed?
You do, during discovery. The routing rules are yours; the system’s contribution is diagnosing the exception, attaching the evidence and applying the rule consistently at three in the morning as well as at three in the afternoon.
What does overnight coverage actually mean here?
Monitoring continues, known patterns are remediated and verified against your runbooks, and novel failures are raised to on-call with the investigation already done. The person woken up gets a diagnosis, not an alert.
What happens when it gets a diagnosis wrong?
The run record shows what it retrieved and why it concluded what it did, which is what makes the failure correctable rather than mysterious. Actions that are hard to reverse sit behind an approval gate precisely because no diagnosis is right every time.
Solutions
How we build it
AI Automation
Explorereducing manual handoffs and routing exceptions to the right people.
Workflows that read unstructured input, apply judgement and route the exceptions to people.
AI Integration
Exploreconnecting intelligent systems to the software your business already runs on.
Connecting intelligent systems to your CRM, ERP, databases and internal tools, reliably.
Multi-Agent Systems
Explorecoordinating specialist agents with clear control boundaries.
Specialist agents with narrow scope, working under an orchestrator that manages context and control.
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