Quotation TAT Masterclass
Ninety minutes on the two leaks in every quotation: the enquiries you quote too slowly, and the margin your agents keep.
- Both leaks measured on your own desk, not on a slide
- One of your RFQs run live: every agent asked at once, chased, and priced
- A before-and-after report and a blueprint, in your numbers
- How you join
- By application
- One to one
- Length
- About 90 minutes
- Cost
- Free
- No obligation
What forwarders tell us
| Ideally | In practice | |
|---|---|---|
| Agents asked, per leg | 8–10 | 3–4 |
| Rates you get to compare | all of them | whatever arrived in time |
| Negotiating for target rates | every quote | rarely |
| Quote reaches the customer | same day | next day |
| Agents you ask for rates | 8–10 | 3–4 |
| The rate you quote from | the lowest of ten | the lowest of four |
| Going back to negotiate | every job | almost never |
| What you finally pay the agent | a negotiated rate | their first rate |
We measure yours in the session
What the ninety minutes include
Five parts, in this order. The last two are yours to keep.
- The assessment
Both leaks measured on your own desk. Agents asked against agents available, and where the hours go between the enquiry landing and the quote leaving.
- The walkthrough
What an agent actually does at each step of a quote — reads, chases, fetches, prices, drafts — and exactly where a person still decides.
- The live run
One of your own RFQs, end to end, in front of you. Every agent on the lane emailed in one go, the slow ones chased, the replies priced. You time it.
- The impact reportYours to keep
Both leaks in your numbers, before and after, with the waiting separated from the working. Written to be forwarded to whoever signs things off.
- The blueprintYours to keep
What closing each leak would take on your own desk, in what order, and what has to be true for it to work. Yours whether you buy anything or not.
- +70%
- More shipments quoted, with the same five-person team, Q4 2024 against Q4 2025
- 35% → 73%
- Quotes won
- 60 → 15 min
- Average time to answer a quote
Infinity Logistics · signed reference · May 2026
These are Infinity Logistics’ numbers, not an average and not a promise about your desk. One company, one year, one signed reference. The point of the ninety minutes is to work out the distance from where you actually are — and if it is short, the report says so.
Who this is for
A quote takes over two hours of your team’s time, then up to a day waiting on agents. So you ask three or four instead of eight or ten, you quote from the lowest of four, and by the time you reply somebody faster already has. Then you win the job, your selling price is fixed, and nobody goes back to the agent to negotiate against it.
You are asked to take more enquiries without more people. You will be the one recommending anything upward.
You own the quote and the margin. You want to judge this on the work, not the slogans.
No strangers in the room. Your firm, your work, your own space, and one of our people beside you.
the desk staff who quote all day. They have their own workshop, where they work on their own enquiries. Owners and CXOs start with the assessment.
What if I recommend it and it fails in front of everybody?
That is the right worry, so the session is built around it. Nobody else is in the room. You run your own enquiries in your own space, and you go deep enough into how the work is done to poke holes in it. You leave with a benchmark in your own numbers, so what you say upward rests on those.
Quotation TAT
Every forwarder has this number. Almost nobody has measured it. This session is built around it.
- What it is
- TAT is turnaround time. An enquiry lands in your inbox at 10:00. Your quote goes out at 11:45. Your TAT on that one is 1 hour 45 minutes.
- How to measure it tomorrow morning
- Take your last 20 enquiries. Write down when each one arrived and when the quote went out. Add up the 20 gaps and divide by 20. One person can do it in an hour with a notepad.
- Why it matters to you
- Your customer sent the same enquiry to three or four forwarders. The first sensible quote usually wins. Every hour your quote waits is an hour someone else can use.
- What good looks like
- One customer we can name went from more than 60 minutes to about 15. Their signed numbers are further down this page.
How many people touch one enquiry before the quote goes out. Three is common. One is possible.
This is the number that decides when you hire. If it goes up, you grow without adding people.
A wrong weight, lane or charge line. You usually find out when the customer does.
- A pricing desk of four people gets 20 enquiries a day. At one to two hours each, that is 20 to 40 hours of quoting a day.
- Where the rate can be fetched without waiting on a person, the same quote goes out in 10 to 15 minutes. The four people check and approve instead of typing.
- In the session you do this sum for your own desk, with your own numbers. Nobody has to take our word for it.
Where a lane has to be priced by another agent or over the phone, the wait belongs to whoever is answering. The tool still writes the request, chases the reply and turns it into a priced quote when it lands.
A slow quote costs you more than the hours it takes.
You are asked to take more enquiries without more people. Here is what the current way of quoting costs you, every day.
Your customer sends the same enquiry to several forwarders at once. The one who comes back first with a sensible price usually gets the booking.
Read the email. Open the attachments. Ask for the missing weight. Check the rates. Work the margin. Write the reply. By hand, that is one to two hours of somebody's day.
When enquiries grow, the only lever most firms have is hiring. So your margin stops growing at the point your business starts to.
Pricing to operations to accounts. Each hand-off is a forward, a copy and a re-type. Somewhere a weight or a charge line goes wrong.
Four things that move when the fetching and typing is done for you
Your desks feel this in four places. Each one names the number it moves, next to one customer's signed result.
Faster quotes win more of the enquiries you already get. At Infinity Logistics, average response time fell from more than 60 minutes to about 15 minutes, and the win rate rose from 35% to 73%.
Fewer hands on a quote means fewer wrong ones, and a wrong quote eats the margin. At Infinity Logistics, the quotation error rate fell from 67% to under 5%.
You take on more enquiries without a hire at every step. Infinity Logistics quoted 70% more shipments with the same five-person team, comparing Q4 2024 with Q4 2025.
Your customer hears back in minutes, not hours. Answers “where is my cargo?” on the customer’s own thread, from carrier status, for approval.
By the end, you can do these things
- Measure your quotation TAT the same way every time, in an hour, with a notepad.
- Split one enquiry into waiting time and working time, and see which is bigger.
- Say which steps in a quote need a person and which do not.
- Put a value on a faster quote, using your own win rate and margin.
- Ask any AI vendor, including us, five questions, and know what a good answer sounds like.
- Write a one-page TAT benchmark your owner can read in five minutes.
- Explain to your owner what agentic AI does and does not do, in one minute.
- Tell an add-on from an AI-native system with three questions.
Both leaks in your own numbers. For time: your quotation TAT step by step, with the waiting separated from the working, against the same enquiry run on the tool. For margin: agents asked against agents available, the rate you quoted against the lowest you could have had, and what you finally paid after the win. Then what closing each one would take on your own desk, in what order. Where a gap would not move, it says so: a lane another agent has to price still waits on that agent.
- Your quotation TAT, measured in the session
- A one-page TAT benchmark for your own operation, sent within one working day
- The five questions to put to any vendor
- One customer's signed numbers, named, to compare against
- What other forwarders do differently, from public, sourced examples
Meant to reachYour owner or CEO. It is written to be forwarded to the person who signs things off. Sent within one working day of the session.
- The session is about your work, not our slides. You will see FreighAI, because that is the thing you are putting your hands on, and at the end we will tell you plainly what is free and what is paid. Nobody is obliged to buy anything.
- One to one means one company at a time, not one person. Bring anyone else from your firm who should be there, as long as this is the right programme for their job. You are never in a room with another company.
- Applying is not the same as being accepted. Every session is run by a person, on your own work, so places are limited and there are conditions — the programme has to be the right one for your role, and we have to be able to help.
- Applications are read in the order they arrive. We get more than we can take at once, so there is usually a wait for a date. You will be told where you stand, and you will hear back either way.
- Bring your quotation TAT if you know it. Rough numbers from memory are fine.
- Your numbers and your work stay yours. Nothing is published and nothing is shown to another firm.
- You get your own space in FreighAI, with a slice of your own work in it, and a person walking you through it. Not a recorded demo and not somebody else's sample data.
- We are a small team and every session is run by a person, on your own work. So we read each application and talk to you first. It is not about keeping people out. It is about not wasting your morning on something that was never going to fit.
One customer signed off their numbers. Here they are, named.
We do not show averages we cannot stand behind. Infinity Logistics, a UAE forwarder, has run on FreighAI for more than a year and signed a reference in May 2026. These are their numbers, not a promise about yours.
One company, one year, one signed reference. There is no market-wide number yet. In the session, your own TAT goes next to these numbers so you can see the distance for yourself.
The risks, named, and what counters each one
A page that hides the risk is a pitch. These are the five risks you carry, and what counters each one.
It prices a lane wrong, or promises a date your operation cannot keep. The customer sees it before you do.
CounterYour team approves every reply before it sends. Every version of a quote is kept, and the line that changed is shown. Ask any vendor, including us, to show you one it got wrong.
Your pricing people think it is coming for their job, so they carry on working in the inbox.
CounterOne task screen instead of the inbox. Your team approves. They do not compose, forward, file or chase. The reply goes out in their name. Send one desk person to the workshop to try it on their own enquiry first.
It is bought, set up, and never really running. The old way carries on beside it.
CounterTake one lane at a time, with your desk staff in the room. Measure the TAT on that lane before you widen it.
You stop using it, and you cannot get your own data out.
CounterAsk for the export before you sign, and try it once. Keep your TMS as the record if you want to.
Your rates, your customers and your margins end up somewhere they should not.
CounterAsk where the data lives, who can see it, and whether it trains anything for anyone else. In this session it is only your firm and our team, and nothing of yours is ever shown to another company.
Who is in control
The worry we hear most: what if the AI misbehaves, and do I have any control? Here is the honest answer, part by part.
Every message a customer sees waits for a person. The agent does the work, creates a task, and notifies the person to sign it off. Quotes, counter-offers, tracking answers, anything a customer reads.
At the sign-off, the person can edit the message, approve it, or reject it. It is an editable panel, and that is the point of it. Every version of a quote is kept, and the line that changed is shown.
An approved message goes out in the person’s own name, with their own signature, from their own email. No customer ever sees that AI works behind it.
Autonomy is set per task type: supervised, where a person signs, or automatic. Every message a customer sees is locked to supervised. Chasers, reminders, tracking checks and quote expiry can be set to run on their own. The rules and timing for chasers and reminders are set by the head of operations or an admin. Quote expiry rules are set by the pricing executive. Chasers and reminders can be switched off for one customer or one lane.
Role-based access control: the admin decides who can see, edit and approve what, role by role. A junior desk can be allowed to draft and not to send.
The 85% is effort taken out of the cycle: the reading, fetching, drafting and chasing. A person still signs every customer-facing message.
There is no pause switch yet for one customer, one lane or the whole company. Today the person at the sign-off is that control: nothing a customer sees goes out without a person. Such cases are the exception. There is no automatic margin floor yet. Today it is the staff’s job at the sign-off to keep a quote above the margin. Automatic floors are planned.
How to tell an old system with AI buttons from a system built around the work
Most systems you will be shown are older systems with AI buttons added. A few are built around the work itself. Three checks tell them apart, and you can run all three on screen in the session.
Add-onA chat box beside the same old screens. Your people still live in the inbox.
AI-nativeYour people work in FreighAI, not in the inbox. Watches every company mailbox, pricing, operations, tracking and accounts, and follows each conversation from start to finish.
Add-onYou still open the portals and the rate cards. The tool writes a summary of what you found.
AI-nativePulls your rate cards, checks the carrier, looks up the customer’s history, reads the shipment status, and talks to your TMS or accounting system.
Add-onNobody, or everybody. Ask whose name the reply went out in and see if there is an answer.
AI-nativeYour team approves. They do not compose, forward, file or chase. The reply goes out in their name.
Real companies, real work, with the source beside each one
We name one customer, because one customer signed off their numbers. More firms go here as they sign off theirs.
- Infinity Logistics
At Infinity Logistics, average response time fell from more than 60 minutes to about 15 minutes, and the win rate rose from 35% to 73%. Infinity Logistics quoted 70% more shipments with the same five-person team, comparing Q4 2024 with Q4 2025.
- C.H. Robinson
More than 30 AI agents read emailed quote and capacity requests, price the quote, process the order, classify the freight and set the appointment. Stated result: "delivers customer-specific price quotes in just 32 seconds"; "5,500 truckload orders per day", "saving 600 hours of labor daily"; "Instead of waiting up to four hours for a person to get to their shipment in an email queue, over 5,200 customers are getting their loads accepted in under 90 seconds".
- Flexport
A real-time door-to-door pricing engine, voice agents that call carriers, and an agent that audits past customs entries. Stated result: "Early adopters of our Control Tower saw freight cost savings of 10% on average" (a company statement about its own customers).
- Forto
An assistant called Flash scans email for booking requests, pulls out the details, picks a vessel and files the documents to the shipment. Stated result: No number stated ("often within minutes").
What stops a head of operations from acting on this, and what the session does about each one.
These are the things COOs and heads of operations tell us, in their words. None of them is silly. Each one shaped how this session is built.
“If I recommend it and it fails, it is my name on it.”
HereYou recommend nothing on the day. You leave with a one-page benchmark in your own numbers. If there is a next step, it is another programme, not a contract.
“My desks are already stretched. I cannot run a project on top of the day job.”
HereThis is ninety minutes, once. Nothing in your operation changes because you came. If you ever go further, it runs one lane at a time, and the first thing it removes is the fetching and re-typing that stretches your desks now.
“My pricing people will fight it. They think it is coming for their job.”
HereThe part it takes is the fetching, copying and typing. The judgement stays with the person, and they approve every reply before it sends. Send one of them to the workshop and let them try it on their own enquiry first.
“We already have a TMS. I do not want another system in the way.”
HereThe session shows where the time goes: in the mailboxes and in the hand-offs between desks, not in the TMS. Whether it fits your setup is one of the five questions we send you home with.
“I do not own the budget, so why should I look?”
HereYou own the number that decides the budget: TAT, hands per quote, enquiries per person. The benchmark is written to be forwarded to the person who signs, with the evidence attached.
“I do not understand AI well enough to judge it.”
HereNinety minutes of watching one real enquiry handled, desk by desk, is the shortest way to understand it. You can stop us and argue at any point. That is what the time is for.
“Every session I have sat through was a pitch.”
HereNothing in this session sells you anything. You get one customer's signed numbers, named, the room's numbers with no names, and five questions to test any vendor with, including us.
“How do I know it fits a firm like mine?”
HereThe benchmark answers that in your numbers, for your modes and your lanes. It is allowed to say not yet, and it says where the time goes either way.
The TAT read: five steps
This is how we look at quoting in the session. You can do the first four on your own desk the next morning. No software needed.
- 01Follow one enquiry
Pick one real enquiry. Trace it from the moment it lands to the moment the quote goes out. Every desk it touched. Every wait in between.
- 02Count three things
TAT: landing to sent. Touches: how many times a person picked it up. Hands: how many people it passed through.
- 03Split waiting from working
Most of the TAT is waiting: for a rate, for a missing weight, for somebody senior to check. The work is minutes. The waiting is hours.
- 04Split fetching from judging
Which touches needed a decision? Which were just fetching, copying and typing? The second kind can be done for you. The first kind stays with a person.
- 05Write the one-pager
Your numbers today. The same enquiry with the fetching done for you. What would have to change in your operation. That is the page you leave with.
We measure both leaks on your own desk, run one enquiry live, and leave you a blueprint. In that order, and we keep time.
- 0 to 10How a quote gets done here
The route an enquiry takes from landing to sent. How many agents you ask, on which lanes, and who waits on whom.
- 10 to 30Leak one: the enquiries you quote too slowly
One real enquiry, timed step by step. The waiting separated from the working, so you can see which is which. Your quotation TAT, read rather than guessed.
- 30 to 45Leak two: the margin your agents keep
Agents asked against agents available. The rate you quoted against the lowest you could have had. Then what happened after the customer confirmed, which is usually nothing.
- 45 to 65Live: one RFQ, end to end
Every agent on that lane emailed in one go with the charge lines filled in, the slow ones chased, the replies priced and margin-checked, the reply drafted. You time it, and you decide what would go out.
- 65 to 80Before and after, side by side
Your two numbers next to the same enquiry run on the tool. Where the gap is real, and where it is not: a lane another agent has to price still waits on that agent.
- 80 to 90Your blueprint
What closing each leak would take on your own desk, in what order, and the five questions to put to any vendor, us included.
- You apply: your role, your firm size, your TAT if you know it, and the one thing you want to see change. Ten minutes at most.
- A person reads it and calls you, so we understand your desk before we build anything.
- If it fits we set up your own space in FreighAI and load a slice of your own enquiries into it.
- About ninety minutes, one to one. Your quotation TAT measured with you, the same way every time.
- One of your own enquiries followed desk by desk, then the same enquiry with the fetching done for you.
- You drive it yourself with one of our people beside you. Stop us and argue at any point.
- Your one-page benchmark by email within one working day, written to be sent to your owner.
- Recommend it, park it, or say no. Nobody chases you either way.
- If you want a next step: the assessment for your owner, or the TAT reduction programme.
The tool is on screen for twenty-five minutes because you cannot judge the idea without seeing the work. Three steps of one enquiry, today and on the tool.
TodaySomebody spots it in a shared inbox, opens the attachments, works out what is being asked.
On the toolWorks out what each email is and what it needs, then takes the action that message calls for. Reads PDF, Excel, Word, forwarded email, WhatsApp messages, photos and scans.
TodayRate cards, two portals, a phone call to an agent, a spreadsheet for the margin. An hour goes here.
On the toolPulls your rate cards, checks the carrier, looks up the customer’s history, reads the shipment status, and talks to your TMS or accounting system. Emails all your agents for a lane in one go, with the route and charge lines filled in, then chases the ones who do not reply.
TodayWritten from scratch, checked by somebody senior when they are free, then sent.
On the toolDrafted and margin-checked, waiting in front of the right person. Your team approves every reply before it sends.
85% of quotes are processed end-to-end by AI; the remaining 15% route to your team. That 15% is the judgement calls. They are the part of the job worth keeping.
Apply for your session
Ten minutes to apply. A person reads every one and comes back within 24 hours, either way. Places are limited and there is usually a wait for a date.
Twenty years in industry across sales, operations and digital transformation.
Building software since twelve; the product's architect.
- AI Impact Assessment →For your owner or CEO: a structured assessment of the whole operation, and a written report they can put to the board.
- Quotation TAT Reduction Programme →Three months on your own data, until it genuinely runs. Only for firms that attended something first.
Where we stand, on the record
The policy, the government data and the technology all arrived within a few years of each other. That window is open now, and it is open to any forwarder willing to spend a morning on it.
FreighAI has been an authorised ULIP user since August 2026 and works with its APIs directly: port and container tracking, customs status, air cargo, vehicle and FASTag data, e-way bills, and GST and IEC checks.
What we read through ULIP→ULIP exists because of the National Logistics Policy 2022, which also set the country a target: India in the top 25 of the World Bank's Logistics Performance Index by 2030, and logistics costs down towards single digits as a share of GDP.
The policy, and what we do with it→AggAiLabs Software Solutions Private Limited, with its office in Pune, India, recognised by DPIIT under number DIPP232097. That is a public record, and you can check it without asking us.
The company behind FreighAI→Infinity Logistics put their own numbers in writing in May 2026 and let us publish them. Every figure on this website comes from that document, and we name them every time we use one.
Read the reference→Being an authorised ULIP user means we are licensed to read the government’s logistics data through its APIs. It does not mean the government endorses FreighAI or has any view on this Playground.
Before you sign up
What does TAT mean?
Turnaround time. Here it means the time from a customer's enquiry landing in your inbox to your quote leaving it. Forwarders use the short form, so we do too.
How is this different from the workshop?
Here you decide whether this is worth doing. In the workshop your desk staff do it themselves, on their own enquiries. Different room, different job. Many firms send one person to each.
Is this a product demo?
The tool is on screen for about twenty-five minutes, because you cannot judge the idea without seeing the work. You can argue with it. Nobody sells you anything, and there is no follow-up call unless you ask for one.
What if I do not know my TAT?
Say not sure on the form. Working out how to measure it is step two of the session, and the one-pager you leave with gives you the figure.
Who else is in the session?
Only your firm and one of our people. Bring another manager from your own company if this is their number too. You are never put in with another company, and nothing of yours is shown to one.
Do you have a result I can look at?
At Infinity Logistics, average response time fell from more than 60 minutes to about 15 minutes, and the win rate rose from 35% to 73%. Infinity Logistics quoted 70% more shipments with the same five-person team, comparing Q4 2024 with Q4 2025. That is one customer's signed result, not a promise about yours. The session exists so that you leave with a figure of your own.
Can I bring my head of pricing?
Yes. One or two seats per firm, so you and one colleague can both come. Two people from the same operation usually get more out of it than one.
Not sure which programme is yours?
Start at the Playground. It shows the three programmes side by side and which one belongs to your role.