Every day is busy. Brokers juggle dozens of new loads, carriers, follow-ups and load board ads. Shipments need tracking. Documents need collecting. When something slips, a competitor gets the load or a mistake is made.
Founded in 1934, La Route moves freight across road, sea and air. Both the Bordeaux and Rouen agencies have used Guided AI agents to:
- Find carriers for over 26,000 loads
- Track 3,000 shipments from pickup to delivery
- Collect and check Proof of Delivery documents
The challenge
A forwarding desk lives on two clocks.
The first is the race to cover the load:
- Reach out to the partner carriers who have done similar lanes
- Post on load boards
- Refresh those posts every thirty minutes
- Call back every ad viewer before they book a different load
Most brokers clear the first two steps. Then, a new load pings the inbox and the load is lost by step four. By the time a broker has found the time to call back the carrier who viewed the ad, that carrier has booked something else.
The second clock starts the moment a carrier says yes. They have to:
- Contact the loading and delivery sites
- Make sure the truck is on time
- Get the signed Proof of Delivery back
- Check the document details to ensure there are no reservations or discrepancies
Neither task is complex. But the amount of time needed to do each task grows as the business grows. The team no longer has the time to make every call or chase every shipment.
What Guided does
Finding carriers
Staff at both agencies email the agent their loads. This could be a single email or a spreadsheet full of loads to work on. The agent takes over the process and:
- Posts each load to load boards
- Emails carriers that La Route has worked with in the past
- Contacts every carrier who viewed the offer
When a carrier replies, the agent hands the response to the broker on that load, who negotiates the price and closes the deal.
26,000+ loads posted to carrier search.
Following the transport
Once a load is locked in, the broker then has to make sure it gets done right.
To loop in an agent, the broker just CCs the AI inbox and it picks up from there. It reminds the carrier of the loading and delivery slots, checks the transport is running to plan, then requests the signed CMR a week after delivery, giving drivers time to drop their paperwork at the office.
3,000+ shipments tracked end to end.
Adoption across the whole team
More than twenty people at the two agencies now send loads to the agent, for carrier search and for tracking alike.
Bordeaux and Rouen serve different customers: each keeps its own carriers, its own lanes, its own way of working. The agent adapts to each desk rather than asking each desk to adapt to it.
What La Route says
"What works really well is that the agent contacts everyone who views an offer, not just the ones it posted itself. That's the job none of us ever really has time to do. One of my colleagues sold freight she might well have lost otherwise, simply because she hadn't had time to call the carriers who had looked at her offer."
"Guided is proactive, available and responsive, everything we need in our business."
Priscille Menard, La Route
"We started on one agency and it now runs well across both, on the whole desk. What I ask of Guided is simple: keep telling us what you are building."
Pierre-Julien Allard, La Route
