How do I look at my own work and see where AI fits?

A demo shows you a product working. It does not show you your own week.

Demos run on a clean enquiry. The port is named. The weight is there. The rate is already in the system. Your inbox is not like that.

Your own desk holds the real waits. The photo of a packing list. The agent who did not reply. The rate typed out again by hand. None of that turns up on a slide, and all of it is where your hours go.

There is a second reason. When you have looked at your own work, you stop being sold to. You walk into every meeting with a list, and you ask each person to show you their answer to it. The list is yours. It does not change from vendor to vendor.

You need no software to do this. One enquiry, a sheet of paper and about an hour is the whole kit.

Five steps, in this order. Do them on one enquiry at a time.

• 01Follow one enquiry. Start at the email that landed. Go all the way to the invoice. Write down every desk it touched and every wait.
• 02Count three things. The turnaround, the touches and the hands. Turnaround is the clock from the enquiry landing to the quote going out. A touch is any time a person opened it. A hand is any person who held it.
• 03Split waiting from working. Mark every line as one or the other. You will find that the working is minutes and the waiting is hours.
• 04Split fetching from judging. Fetching is looking things up, copying and typing. Judging is deciding a price, a risk or a promise.
• 05Circle the fetching. That is where AI fits in your business. That is the list to take to any vendor.

Touches and hands are not the same thing, and the gap between them matters. An example. One enquiry sat with three people. Between them they opened it eleven times. That is three hands and eleven touches. The eleven is the number that hurts.

Judging is the part you are paid for. Fetching is the part that eats the day. Keeping them apart on paper is the whole trick of this method.

Here is a made-up enquiry, written out line by line. Yours will look different. The shape usually does not.

Now add it up. Seven hours passed. Under an hour of that was work. Three lines are pure waiting. Only two lines are judging.

Every other working line is fetching or typing. Those are the lines you circle. Six of them here, one enquiry, one ordinary day.

Notice what the circle does not touch. Nobody circled the margin. Nobody circled the manager reading the quote before it went. That is the judging, and it stays with your people.

Start with pricing. That is where the hours are, and it is the desk your customer feels first.

Then work along the desks below. One line each is enough to tell you whether it is worth a full hour.

Two desks is usually enough to see the pattern. Four is plenty. Do not try to do all seven in one week.

The circled lines are your list. They are the parts of the job that need no judgement from anyone.

Use it like this.

• 01Type the circled lines out in plain words, in the order they happened.
• 02Take that list into every meeting with every vendor. Ours as well.
• 03Ask them to show each line on your enquiry, start to finish, not on their demo.
• 04Watch who does the fetching. If your people still open the portals, the line has not moved.
• 05Write down what you saw the same day, in their words, one line each.

It is only fair that you ask us the same thing. FreighAI describes its own part of the job in one sentence: “Pulls your rate cards, checks the carrier, looks up the customer’s history, reads the shipment status, and talks to your TMS or accounting system.” Hold that against your circled lines. Count how many of them it covers, and how many it does not.

If you would rather not do it alone, the AI Impact Assessment does this with you and goes further. Forty minutes on your desks, systems, roles and volumes, and a written report on where agentic AI would apply in your business.

You can stop here. You already have a list, and that was the point.

If you want to take it further, there are three ways, and they suit different people.

• The AI Impact Assessment is for an owner. Forty minutes on your operation, and a written report in two working days.
• The 90-minute session is for the people who run pricing and operations. Same method, on your desks, with your team in the room.
• The benchmark is five minutes. It tells you how fast other forwarders quote, so your number has something to sit beside.

And if you want to know which desks tend to pay first, read that one next.