How eShipping Partnered with Augment’s AI to Automate Two-Thirds of its Daily LTL Tracking

Company Name: eShipping

Location: Kansas City, Missouri

Founded: 2004

Size: 500+ employees, 6 regional offices, and 10 warehouses

Services: Domestic and international transportation management across LTL, TL, Parcel, Warehousing and Distribution, and TMS technology

Problem: Rapid growth, both organic and through acquisitions, added manual tracking and email triage work faster than eShipping could scale its teams. eShipping needed a way to keep service levels high and keep growing without adding headcount at the same pace.

Results at a Glance:

• Automated two-thirds of eShipping’s daily LTL shipment tracking

• Automated shipment building for 70% of LTL pickup requests that arrived by email

What eShipping delivers to their customers

eShipping runs transportation and distribution chain management for their customers across LTL, TL, Parcel, Warehousing and Distribution, with a proprietary TMS built by their own engineers. eShipping has grown both organically and by acquisition since its founding, acquiring Superior Transport and Logistics and Synapsum in 2024 and IL2000 in 2025. eShipping is a trusted managed transportation provider in the mid-market and has a long-term vision of becoming a nationally recognized provider across all market sizes and verticals.

Every acquisition at eShipping brought in additional customers and work for operators. A shipment still needed a status every day, a pickup request still needed a rep to read it, and an exception still needed a person to decide what happened next. Growth by acquisition multiplies that work faster than any 3PL can hire for it. The work also compounded across multiple workflows for each business that joined. eShipping wanted to implement one process across the whole company, and they wanted to take on more freight while freeing their operators to better serve customers instead of getting bogged down in tracking.

The problem eShipping faced

eShipping monitors each of their shipments daily, with operators flagging at-risk shipments so customers can expedite them, reschedule, or let them ride. The faster a shipper hears about a missed pickup, the better positioned they are to determine next steps.

Before Augment, tracking started every morning with a set of reports that listed thousands of LTL shipments in motion. Ten or more people split them up, opened each carrier’s portal, pulled the status, compared the estimated delivery against the must-arrive-by date, and moved to the next shipment. Jerry Schlotzhauer, then an operations manager and now eShipping’s Director of AI Initiatives, spoke to the sheer time the process required from operators.

“When we did the math, it was right at 90 seconds per pull across the board, and that average included the shipments that were on time, where there was no additional action required from our team.” - Jerry Schlotzhauer, Director of AI Initiatives, eShipping

Ninety seconds per data pull worked out to a baseline of 320 shipments tracked per person per day. Keeping up with that tracking cost eShipping’s operators significant amounts of time that could have been spent solving harder problems, serving customers, or pursuing the next shipper.

Shipment building had the same problem. Email cost the team more time than any other pickup-request channel, because email is an unstructured channel by nature, and a representative often wrote back to the shipper for one more detail before the shipment could be entered into the system. A shipment built from email took about 9 minutes of time.

Every one of those status pulls and follow-up emails was a coordination tax eShipping’s operators had to pay before they could do the work customers expected.

“We intend to grow into a national provider, so we needed a way to scale without increasing costs. Augment’s AI handles status retrieval, so our team can focus on our customers, and now we move more freight with the same team.” - Stephanie Bixler, CTO at eShipping

How eShipping chose an AI partner

eShipping’s leadership chose to partner on AI rather than build it in-house. Their engineers had already built their proprietary TMS and other customer-facing systems, and leadership wanted them to remain focused on that work. eShipping selected Augment as their AI partner in part because of the platform’s ability to work in the systems eShipping already used. Augment’s flagship AI teammate, Augie, addressed eShipping’s needs with no APIs, no developer hours, and no changes to eShipping’s systems. Every workflow eShipping adds to Augie’s plate today runs on the same terms.

The Augment team shadowed eShipping’s trackers in Kansas City to build a specialized process for each carrier the team serves. eShipping set Augie to work on premium tracking first because it was the largest source of retrieval work in the building, but they saw additional opportunities for automation throughout the company.

“Everywhere we have retrieval-style tasks en masse, we’re going to identify them and automate them with Augment, one at a time. Every one Augie takes over raises the number of shipments per day each person on our team can handle.” - Jerry Schlotzhauer, Director of AI Initiatives, eShipping

One habit separated Augment from the other AI vendors eShipping had evaluated. When a carrier changes how it responds, Augment flags the change and recommends options for next steps.

“When Augment’s team sees something as the experts, they point it out. They give us the option, and we make the decision. The push has been very helpful, and not every AI organization we’ve worked with has given us that.” - Jerry Schlotzhauer, Director of AI Initiatives, eShipping

How eShipping’s team and its AI teammates share the work

eShipping calls its tracking agent Augie and its shipment-building agent Laila. Augie starts work before the tracking team logs on, takes the same reports the team used to split up, and retrieves the status for each shipment. It compares the carrier’s estimated delivery against the must-arrive-by date and surfaces every exception to the customer liaison. The liaison presents the options, and the customer chooses to expedite, reschedule, or let it ride. eShipping’s SOP didn’t change, but the team no longer spends their morning retrieving the information.

Laila does the same for work that starts with an email instead of a report. When a pickup request arrives by email, Laila reads it, builds the pickup form, and asks the shipper for any detail it needs. The shipment lands in the same queue the team already works from. Laila builds about 70% of the LTL pickup requests that arrive by email. When a request arrives without a required detail, or when a request belongs to another team, Laila routes it to the right place.

“If you ask the managers, they love Augie, because our teams do more meaningful work now. They solve more complex issues instead of confirming on-time loads and our customers get more value. If you ask the folks doing the work, they’d tell you their job got more stimulating. The easy wins, the on-time shipments they used to get credit for tracking, are gone, because Augie already tracked them.” - Jerry Schlotzhauer, Director of AI Initiatives, eShipping

The results: More capacity, earlier exceptions, the same high-touch service

Most of eShipping’s tracking starts with a PRO number Augie has to track down. In one month, Augie placed over 6,000 phone calls and over 2,300 emails to carriers to track down those PRO numbers. eShipping counts a minute for every tracking action and five minutes for every shipment its team builds by hand.

Today, Augment automates roughly two-thirds of eShipping’s daily LTL shipment tracking. With Augie and Laila handling information retrieval, eShipping has been able to direct its people towards completing higher value work.

“Augie took the PRO numbers and tracking statuses off our team’s plates, so we reallocated their time to more meaningful work, like client care and shipment building.” - Jerry Schlotzhauer, Director of AI Initiatives, eShipping

Since implementing Augie and Laila, eShipping has seen the number of shipments handled per person per day increase substantially, driving company growth. Augie’s tracking file reaches eShipping by 9:45 AM Central every day, and the customer liaisons have more than two hours of runway before the deadline to expedite a load, reschedule a pickup, or call a shipper before the shipper calls them.

eShipping turned AI from a project into a function. Jerry Schlotzhauer scoped the first workflow as an operations manager, and eShipping created the Director of AI Initiatives role for him at the start of 2026. In his new role, he will continue to scope additional automation opportunities with Augment.

Two workflows run in production today with a third in build.

What’s next for eShipping and Augment

eShipping plans to scale Laila to other teams across the business that receive shipment requests by email. They also plan to scale premium tracking with Augie to their full customer base. Beyond LTL, eShipping and Augment are also deploying Augie for FTL load building on McLeod. Down the line, eShipping plans to expand with Augment on additional LTL workflows.

Augie and Laila changed what an acquisition means for eShipping’s operators. The next company the business acquires will bring its own portals and its own habits, and eShipping’s team will meet them with one process already in place and a teammate ready to take on the information retrieval work.