Company Name: Transportation One

Location: Chicago, IL

Size: Mid-market, high-volume, non-asset freight brokerage

Services: Full Truckload (FTL), strategic carrier capacity, carrier compliance, booking and tracking operations across North America

Problem: At scale, manual freight operations doesn't just slow you down — it quietly inflates your cost to move every load. Transportation One was growing fast, leaving operators buried in tedious work that scaled poorly.

Results: Transportation One turned to Augie, Augment's flagship AI teammate for logistics, embedding it across the operation. The result: seven figures in annualized cost savings. Augie drives productivity gains across every major workflow and captures margin on loads that previously went unoptimized — two levers, working simultaneously, on every load. It's a key piece in Transportation One's clear path to ~$120M in freight under management, without the traditional cost structure to match.

When rapid growth changed the math

Over 15 years, Transportation One has earned recognition as a reliable, high-performing brokerage, trusted by large food, retail, and manufacturing shippers with little margin for error. Speed and consistency aren't aspirational goals for the team—they are the standard.

The operation runs with discipline. Freight moves, customers are served, and operators know how to keep the business running under pressure.

"Nothing was broken, but too much of the work lived between systems. We spent time rebuilding information, double-checking details, and coordinating just to keep freight moving."

— Tony Cosentino, Director of Procurement, Transportation One

But as the business grew, load volumes grew, and more of the work started living in the margins. Coverage reps spent their days jumping between systems, chasing PODs, checking tracking status, rebuilding load details from emails, and following up with carriers. None of this work was strategic. It was simply required to keep freight moving. It worked—until growth made the drag impossible to ignore.

The issue wasn't people or process. It was fragmentation.

"A lot of the work lived in different systems. You'd get part of the information in an email, part of it in the TMS, then you'd still have to go verify or fill in the gaps somewhere else. Nothing was wrong on its own—it just wasn't connected."

— Max Blum, Carrier Sales Representative, Transportation One

Every step in the life of a load lived in a different place. Booking didn't always feed clean data downstream. Tracking updates depended on manual follow-ups. Exceptions surfaced late, often without context.

At scale, those gaps add up. For example, Transportation One fields roughly 13,000 inbound carrier calls per month. Each new carrier can take five to ten minutes to screen and onboard. Even experienced operators were capped by how much operational work they could absorb in a day.

Hiring more people would help in the short term, but leadership knew it wouldn't fix the underlying model. What they needed wasn't more effort.

They needed leverage - the kind only AI can unlock.

Why Transportation One chose Augment as its AI partner

Transportation One wasn't looking to optimize a single task with AI.

They had seen how quickly traditional tools accumulate across coverage, booking, compliance, and tracking—each one solving a narrow problem while pushing coordination back onto operators. The risk wasn't inefficiency in any one system; it was fragmentation across the life of a load.

To be a fit for Transportation One, any AI solution had to meet a clear set of requirements:

• Connect work across systems — Information needed to carry forward automatically, without operators rebuilding context between teams.

• Earn operator trust through accuracy — The AI had to be reliable enough that teams could stop double-checking work and filling in gaps manually.

• Follow existing SOPs and operating discipline — Transportation One didn't need a new way to run freight. Any AI solution had to adapt to how the team already worked.

• Deliver value across multiple teams — Coverage, strategic capacity, compliance, and booking all needed to benefit—value couldn't plateau after one workflow.

• Change the scaling math of the business — Growth couldn't require proportional increases in headcount. The AI had to absorb work that never needed to be human.

Augment met those requirements. Augie, Augment's AI teammate, was built to work across the entire carrier lifecycle, embedded directly into the systems Transportation One already used—TMS, email, DAT, and Highway. Instead of asking operators to change how they worked, it reduced the number of steps required to do the work well.

"As we think about where Transportation One needs to be over the next few years, the question isn't just how we grow—it's how we grow without adding complexity or cost at the same rate. Augment gives us an AI-powered operating model that supports those longer-term goals by letting the work scale before the headcount does."

— Jamie Teets, Chief Executive Officer, Transportation One

Deploying AI for scale

Before deploying Augie broadly, Transportation One and Augment took a hard look at how work actually moved through the operation—end to end.

The teams mapped 28 distinct processes across carrier coverage, compliance, booking, tracking, and POD collection. The goal wasn't to redesign Transportation One's workflows, but to understand where work was being duplicated, where context was being lost, and where human effort was being applied to tasks that didn't require it.

That process mapping exercise became the foundation for how Augie was implemented. Instead of addressing one workflow at a time, Transportation One took an end-to-end view and overlaid Augie's AI capabilities directly onto its operating plan.

Load creation was one of the first areas to change. Across activated shippers, Augie now builds 90% of Transportation One's loads automatically, with the vast majority completed without human intervention and in minutes. By standardizing load creation early, downstream teams receive cleaner data, fewer exceptions surface later, and the entire lifecycle moves more predictably.

"I don't have to second-guess it as much. The information is there, so you can just move forward."

— Luis Fernandez, Senior Account Manager, Transportation One

From there, the AI impact compounded.

Routine follow-ups—tracking nudges, POD collection, and first-pass exception handling—moved into the background. Augie now absorbs thousands of weekly touchpoints with drivers and dispatchers, handling the endurance work that previously required constant human attention. In many cases, documents are collected and updates are published without anyone needing to step in. Even when human involvement is required, the process starts earlier and finishes faster because context is already in place. As a result, Transportation One reduced overall time-to-POD collection by more than 50%, shifting POD follow-ups from a manual task to an automated default.

In coverage, Augie took on the first layer of execution—screening inbound carrier calls, automatically disqualifying those that didn't meet Transportation One's requirements, and preparing booking records before reps ever engaged. Roughly a quarter of inbound calls are now handled without reaching a rep, allowing the team to focus almost exclusively on evaluating bids and booking freight—the highest-ROI moments in the workflow.

Operators felt the change immediately.

"A lot of the prep is already done by the time we're involved, so the conversation is about booking, not figuring things out."

— Max Blum, Carrier Sales Representative, Transportation One

Time that used to disappear into chasing documents, updates, and verifications was simply back. Handoffs improved. Exceptions surfaced earlier, with context already attached.

What changed wasn't how hard people worked. It was how much unnecessary work disappeared.

Assessing the real ROI of AI in freight

Transportation One modeled Augie's AI impact the same way they run their business: from the bottom up, with real numbers.

The result is a projected seven-figures in annual cost savings — flowing from five workflows that span the load lifecycle.

Productivity is the larger driver. Across Track & Trace, POD Collection, Load Building & Scheduling, and Trucklist Ingestion, Augie handles work that previously had to be done manually on every load. When that volume moves to AI, operators have capacity for higher-value work without adding cost.

Margin expansion is the structural upside. Productivity gains free up time, but in just the first few quarters, Augie is already capturing precious margin that previously slipped through the cracks.

Together, these aren't projections built on hope. They're built on a mapped understanding of where the work goes, what it costs, and what AI changes about both.

"The question for us was never whether AI could help. It was whether we could find something that actually fit how we operate. Augment does — and the financial impact is real."

— Jamie Teets, Chief Executive Officer, Transportation One

The way the operation runs now

Today, Transportation One operates with a different baseline — and a different growth equation.

Coverage is faster because carriers are qualified earlier. Compliance is stronger because risk is surfaced before negotiation. Booking is cleaner because data flows forward instead of being rebuilt downstream. But what those changes add up to is the more important story: an AI-powered operating model where the work scales without the cost structure scaling alongside it.

It's a key part of Transportation One's path to $120M in freight under management. Augie absorbs the volume that would otherwise require proportional headcount growth — and the ROI case, built workflow by workflow against Transportation One's actual cost base, proves it holds at scale.

"With Augie the work shows up earlier and with context. We're not discovering issues downstream or chasing details after the fact — the operation is more predictable, and decisions happen when they actually matter."

— Tony Cosentino, Director of Procurement, Transportation One

Transportation One didn't add AI on top of their business. They rewired how the work flows from end to end — and built an ROI story that proves it.