Podcast: New multilingual AI agent tracks air waybills, search rates, more

Yael Katzwer
Hello and welcome to another episode of Cargo Facts Connect, the podcast of Cargo Facts, the publication of record for the air cargo and freighter aircraft industries for over 40 years. I’m Deputy Editor Yael Katzwer, and it’s Friday the fifth of September. I’m here speaking with Matt Petot, the founder and CEO of Cargo AI, an airfreight technology provider. Cargo AI, founded in 2019, provides software solutions and an air cargo marketplace to digitize and streamline booking, quoting and tracking.

Yael Katzwer
Just starting, more generally, in the six years or so since you founded cargo, AI, how have you seen the air cargo industry change and its attitude toward digitalization, especially on the booking and quoting side.

Matt Petot
Yeah, I think it changed tremendously. So when I when I remember when I started six years ago, the company, and in every event, it was, the topic was, oh, we need to digital. We need to digitize. We are late. We are late. I think was six years ago, and now, when I look at where we are now, with with more than 100 airlines that are connected, who have made the decision to connect to, to to via API, to Be ready for bread folder, via booking platform or via TMS directly. So I think there has been a lot of work done, and I think we are far from being late now and then, when I look at how AI is being adopted by many airlines and for others and GSA, I can say that, yeah, we are. We shouldn’t be ashamed anymore. We are. We are not. We are not late anymore. So I think that’s that’s great to see.

Yael Katzwer
How did covid 19 affect, that that switching over to being more digital.

Matt Petot
Think it means a realization for everybody that it was important. But at the same time, people were so focused on delivering the goods and making the crisis work that we didn’t really have much time during covid to work on digitalization, because it was a secondary topic that is probably made everybody realized that it was very, very, very needed so that he has to be accelerated.

Yael Katzwer
How are digitalization? AI technologies, APIs and fintech, removing frictions across the supply chain,

Matt Petot
so further digitalization. So by connecting the players that, and that’s what I mentioned, but the freight forwarder system to the airline system, that was the first part to digitalize API, which was a new compared to the ETI messaging that we had for the last 40 years. And that basically helped to to already have the system being able to to talk to each other. And that’s really helped to develop AI, basically. So now, now AI is obviously the main focus of everybody, and as it should, and especially AI agent who can basically take decisions by themselves in a control environment and really reducing efficiency, or removing efficiency, and improving efficiency where it can because, because I think there is nobody in The industry that I talk to who, who receive two little emails. Everybody is is want by emails. And I think that’s that’s really a perfect use case for AI agents. And looking at where the, yeah, the the quality of those AI are now, we’ve been able to train them for over a year now, and the large non language model are very performing. So there is a huge, huge benefit to reduce cost and to increase efficiency and and it means that the staff can focus on on the right task. Again, they. Are still a lot of play people in this industry that are just where their job is to write an airway bill or into a data capture or an airway deal, and convert an airway bill from a paper airway bill to to the system. And so if you can have aI doing that then, then you can take these people and put them on more, more interesting tasks. So that’s really where we are now.

Yael Katzwer
So I know a lot of smaller and medium sized fit forwarders really pride themselves on the human interaction element of their business, that personal touch. How can they make AI and digital booking and quoting balance with that?

Matt Petot
Yeah, I think it’s, it’s not really the only the small one, the large one also are talking about the human touch, and that’s, that’s key, but it doesn’t and it’s the same for airlines. I mean, it’s probably the same in every business. You need to talk to your customer. You don’t want to remove that. But when you look at the mailbox from a small forwarder or small airline, or any line or any forward or receive 1000s of email, and have to deal with 1000s of email every day, and some of them are, where is my shipments and just answering to this kind of email doesn’t bring value, right? So that’s, that’s, if you can remove 50% of those emails with automatic agents, which we are able to do now, and that’s, that’s the great progress of this year, then you can have more, much more time to have this human touch. So adopting AI is actually helping you to adopt, to adopt this and to really, as I said, make the difference by talking to the customer yourself where it matters, right?

Yael Katzwer
And based on my conversations with people in the industry, a lot of them are now on board with yes, we need to digitalize. We definitely need to do that. But still, they’re a bit hesitant when it comes to AI. So I think their main concerns are AI causing inaccuracies, hallucination and just general qualms about having, like I said, less interaction with people. What do you say to those people that are worried about AI messing up and therefore hesitant to even try it?

Matt Petot
Yeah, I I think, I mean, first, AI goes so fast that I think your statements might be, might have been true, maybe last year or two years ago, but now I don’t already have a lot of conversation where people are hesitant. They just more okay. We need, we know we need to go and so help us doing that. So that’s, that’s what we do. And so there is no really. I mean, I don’t really have conversation where people say, should we go into AI? Just like everybody say, Yeah, we need to go into AI. This is the future. This is and it is not the future. Long term is right now. And people have really understood that it’s not the same speed as previous technology before, it was taking a few years or a few decades to to move up from the early adopter to the to the latest adopter. Now, basically it’s really it’s really accelerated AI has accelerated that, and the speed of AI development is there for everybody to see when, when people have been using chat GPT three years ago, and now this can see the difference of quality, and that’s really, really similar to what the use case we are doing. So so now I think the more is, how can we help those company to basically have real use case that are really out there. The great news is that, compared to before, where IT projects needed to be well, well, scoped, and then you had an RFP, and then you had an implementation. So the whole project was taking two years. And now, with AI, or those kind of project that we run, it’s much faster, right? It’s already plug and play. You can, companies can start to use it, and then they do, we do POC right away. We don’t need to go because we already have the API with most of the TMS or the airlines. We already have kind of the data structure in the right way, so there is no additional work to be done, and nothing that’s really the the big win on those kind of projects.

Yael Katzwer
And since you definitely have. Your finger on the pulse of air cargo technologies. What do you think the next big tech disruptor for the air cargo industry might be? What are you seeing rising in prominence these days?

Matt Petot
Yeah, I think we, we are just the beginning of the AI revolution. So we had, we since last year, we kind of have AI that are used in the to basically to read emails and all that. What what we are now in the next, next stage of this AI revolution is the AI agent. And that’s we are just just at the beginning, and that’s what we just launched. And and the AI agents will basically automate and and be basically, when you have 10 100 people in your team, now you have 1000 people in your team, and that’s, that’s really what an AI agent is. It just brings more people to do tasks for for your team. So that’s really the, what I think is going to be the focus of everybody in the next one, one year, one and two years, to to bring as many AI agenda as they can, and to automate a lot of tasks. And then I really believe that then the next stage will be aI robot. So there is a whole physical AI that is going to happen in warehouse. I feel because there is a lot a lot of different, same, the AI robots is really a revolution compared to the previous robot, where you had to code the robot for every potential move here with AI, just understand the context around it and it can then you don’t need to code every moment. So that’s going to be on the warehouse, I think. And then after I think it’s, it’s, it’s really very hard to predict. But what’s for sure is that it’s it’s really accelerating, and AI is going to play with because if you think about it, then if you can, when you have aI working on AI, then it’s just exponential, the speed. And if I use an analogy on our side thing in terms of coding, we, we, we, I think we have 20 developers in our team. In our team and but we had 20 developers last year, but now every developer is using AI agents, and they are the output of our developers is much more than before. It’s It’s forecasted to double at the end of the year, and that’s really exactly the same that I think we can do with airlines. We we can remove 50% of the email and automate that so an AI robot, an AI agent, can very quickly understand, okay, this email is about, where is my shipment. So we just telling me it’s already arrived this this email is about, what do I need? Whether the dimension of the pellet on this aircraft this we can already automate, and then, oh, this email is a bit more complex. I’m going to leave the staff answering it so that’s we can already reply 50% of the email, and that gives basically twice more efficiency for every agent, every staff out there.

Yael Katzwer
When will cargo, ai’s, unified AI agent be available for customers to be using? When will you guys be implementing it?

Matt Petot
Yeah, it has been started to be piloted and tested already. So it’s, it’s cargo, AI, I mean, we call it cargo copilot agent. And so we had cargo copilot for over a year ago, and it was basically a reading email, but from a push of a button. So we have been doing 10,000 of quotes every every month. And from that we learn. And basically we realized that the agent, the staff, was just pushing, pushing, pushing, and everything was the quality was so good that now we basically automated So, so the agent is going to cover co pilot. Agent is going to be available now on WhatsApp. It’s going to be available on email, has basically local stuff that is going to help. We have API so freight forwarder or airlines can also you use it to develop their own use case, and that’s available next week. And so we already started a few pilots already, but now we are going announcing next week,

Yael Katzwer
and I know you’re also going to be launching an AI powered eta prediction integrated into your tracking API. Can you tell me more about that?

Matt Petot
Yeah, so that’s, that’s the AI part around data. So we, we. Already have quite a few data points that we, that we that we are able to predict, and now we launched the tracking so we have a tracking solution that has accumulated a lot of data over the last few years, because we can track 230 elements, any we just need an airway bill number, and we can track the whole milestone for all those led and so with that, we have accumulated a lot of data, and we can then now what we do is we, with AI, we can predict when the when the milestone is going to happen. So based on airlines, based on destination, on routes, etc. So the AI is figuring itself, and it’s pretty accurate, very, very accurate right now, and it’s going to be released end of the end of September.

Yael Katzwer
Does this tool take into account real time data, such as weather? Any other challenges that might spring up, you know, an issue at an airport, things like that.

Matt Petot
It takes into account the past data, of course, and all the data history that we that we learn, and we are adding more and more source. So whether is could be one, but I think is more. It’s the biggest factor will be when, still today, the largest factor are over booking. That’s, that’s what’s really impact if a freight is loaded on the plane or not. And that’s really also depend on the type of freight, but, but there will be strike whether or not that will be tinkering into account in the future.

Yael Katzwer
All right. Thank you so much for meeting with me this morning. I really appreciate it.

Matt Petot
Thank you very much.

Yael Katzwer
That was Matt Petot, CEO of Cargo AI. And that’s all the time we have today. For more coverage of the freighter aircraft and AAM market, visit cargofacts.com. Thank you very much for tuning in, and join us again next time.