AI-Powered Transformation of Freight Pricing Operations
How Tenfold deployed AI agents at Unotrans to compress hours of manual pricing work into minutes — and trained their team to build their own.
Industry
Freight Forwarding & Logistics
Headquarters
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
Engagement
Feb 2026 — Present
Service
AI Enablement Program
A five-person team drowning in 1,000+ pricing emails per week
Tariff Rate Management
Pricing officers manually collected freight rate quotes from 6–7 international cargo agents — received via email in varying formats — and entered them into Excel spreadsheets 2–3 times per week.
Case-by-Case Quotations
Ad-hoc quotation requests required emailing multiple agents, waiting for responses, manually analyzing each quote for cost, transit time, and free days, then recording the analysis by hand.
Scale of the Problem
With each officer processing 200–300 emails per week, the department handled over 1,000 pricing communications weekly — all manually. Rate validity windows of 1–2 weeks created constant pressure to refresh data.
The Cascade Method in action
A crawl-walk-run approach where each AI agent deployed feeds the next, creating compounding automation across the organization.
Crawl
Diagnose
Kickoff session bringing together stakeholders from every department. A dedicated discovery session with the pricing department followed — officers shared their screens and walked us through every step of their tariff management and quotation processes. The Asia/China tariff update cycle was selected as the first target.
Walk
Deploy
Within days, the team built a working proof of concept using Claude Desktop with custom skills. The first AI agent automated email extraction, data interpretation from varying agent formats, branded spreadsheet generation, and human validation — all demonstrated live within 48 hours of discovery.
Walk
Enable
Rather than delivering a finished solution, we conducted weekly workshops where Unotrans staff learned to create, modify, and deploy their own AI skills — with ongoing support via a shared Slack channel.
Run
Scale
With pricing automation established, the engagement expanded to additional departments. Coordination independently identified document reconciliation as a use case. Administration surfaced needs around invoice management and payment pattern analysis. Each new department is a new agent in the cascade.
What the AI agent does
Email Extraction
Claude connects to Gmail and searches for quotation emails from the past 7 days using pricing-specific keywords — EXW, FOB, port names, carrier names, USD/EUR.
Data Interpretation
Claude reads each email body, interpreting structured tables, free-text responses, and agent-specific abbreviations to extract ports, carriers, rates, validity periods, and free days.
Spreadsheet Generation
Claude opens the Unotrans-branded Excel template, populates it with extracted data, removes empty rows, and saves a clean file.
Human Validation
The system pauses for the pricing officer to review and validate the output before any data is finalized, ensuring accuracy while the AI learns from corrections.
Measurable impact from week one
Non-technical pricing officers creating and modifying AI skills independently
Multiple departments proactively identifying automation opportunities without external prompting
Coordination department independently began testing Claude for document reconciliation
AI-first culture developing across the organization with collaborative learning
Started with 1 Claude Pro license — grew to a Team Plan with multi-department coverage
Planned expansion to Salesforce integration for end-to-end pricing automation
The pricing department is enthusiastic. We can see how AI can significantly reduce quotation turnaround time and cost analysis effort. The fact that the approach trains us to solve problems ourselves — rather than creating a dependency — is exactly what we needed.
— Allan Cano, Pricing Officer & Project Champion, Unotrans
Built on proven technology
AI Platform
Anthropic Claude (Team Plan)
Core AI engine for skill execution, data extraction, and document generation
Email Integration
Gmail Connector
Reads agent quotation emails, filters by keywords and date range
Data Processing
Claude Skills (Custom)
Extracts structured pricing data from unstructured email content
Output Generation
Python + openpyxl
Creates branded Excel spreadsheets with Unotrans formatting
Collaboration
Claude Projects
Shared workspace with skills, templates, and instructions
Future Integration
Salesforce
Automatic loading of validated tariff data into CRM
From kickoff to production in weeks
Feb 9, 2026
Program announcement to Unotrans team; Slack channel created
Feb 20
Kickoff meeting — team introductions, methodology overview, first use case identified
Feb 24
Deep-dive discovery with pricing department — full process mapping
Feb 26
First demo — Claude extracting email data and generating branded Excel in real time
Feb 27
Claude 101 training — skills, projects, connectors
Mar 4
Hands-on workshop — pricing team creates skills with live guidance
Mar 6
Expanded weekly engagement; coordination department scheduled for onboarding
Mar 13
IT collaboration — Claude Code installed; Google connector integration in progress
The Tenfold difference
- Problem-first methodology — We started with pain points, not tools.
- Crawl-walk-run deployment — Single-license pilot before scaling to multiple departments.
- Enablement over dependency — Every workshop made the team more self-sufficient.
- Rapid proof of value — Working demo delivered within 48 hours of discovery.
- Embedded collaboration — Shared Slack channel and weekly cadence kept momentum high.
Ready to see what AI can do for your operations?
A 20-minute briefing. We’ll map your highest-impact process and show you exactly how an AI agent would handle it.