What Augment shipped for brokers this quarter

My team shadowed a lot of brokerage reps this year, and one of their biggest frustrations was outbound carrier outreach—when a rep has to call or email one carrier at a time until someone bites. Our CEO Harish Abbott put it well when he opened our fall product recap last week. The job a rep signed up for and the job a rep actually does look different. Reps should spend their day on relationships and margins. Instead they are making tens of hundreds of calls to carriers from load boards and responding to hundreds of emails by copying and pasting info. We call that work the coordination tax: the time reps spend moving information instead of moving freight.

The six new workflows we shipped this quarter take that work off your reps’ plates. We also released a new custom workflow builder that lets you launch brand new workflows and edit your existing ones directly.

Trucklist ingestion and sourcing

The problem: Carriers email trucklists to brokerage reps and capacity inboxes all day. There are too many to read, so reps skim for an obvious match and the rest of the list never reaches your TMS. That capacity can't be used on any other load, and when a list sits unanswered, the carrier books the truck with another broker. With trucklist ingestion and sourcing, Augie reads every trucklist, logs each truck in your TMS, and emails the carrier your best-matched loads automatically.

How it works: Augie reads every rep inbox and shared inbox you give it access to and picks out the trucklist emails, then verifies that you can work with the carrier based on the sender's email or the MC number. If a truck arrives without equipment, lane, or deadhead details, Augie requests them from the carrier. Augie then logs each truck in your TMS, matches it against your open loads, and sends the carrier as many matched loads per truck as you choose. If the carrier bids, Augie negotiates, and if the two sides land under your threshold, Augie books the load and sends the rate con.

Your reps no longer read trucklists one email at a time, and inbox chaos no longer costs you high-margin capacity.

Outbound load sourcing

The problem: When routing guides run out, reps have to cover the load and call or email one carrier at a time. When we shadowed reps, we saw how much of the day this search takes, so we built outbound load sourcing to complement trucklist ingestion and round out Augie’s suite of capacity sourcing workflows.

How it works: Augie activates when a load changes to a status of your choosing, such as available, open, or customer confirmed. Augie runs the load through Augment's carrier matcher, which draws on every carrier you have worked with, every truck from the trucklist workflow, and external partner data such as Highway. Then Augie returns a ranked list of carriers most likely to bid at a high-margin rate. Augie reaches out to those carriers all at once. If the matcher finds other loads the same carrier can move, Augie bundles them into a single email to the dispatcher for readability. You control the email format down to a link into your carrier portal that allows carriers to book directly.

If the carrier bids, Augie negotiates. Augie learns from each bid it collects, so match quality improves over time.

On our fall product recap, Augie ranked the carriers most likely to bid at a good rate, found other open loads the top carrier could also run, and sent that carrier's dispatcher one email covering all of them. Watch the replay.

End-to-end booking

The problem: Each time a sourcing workflow generates bids, reps read every one of them, select the carrier, and make the outbound call to lock in the rate. Rep capacity caps how many loads your team books in a day. Some of our larger customers felt that cap firsthand, and their feedback motivated us to build end-to-end booking.

How it works: This workflow bolts onto any carrier sourcing workflow you already run, whether inbound carrier calls and emails, trucklist ingestion, or outbound sourcing. You set the criteria. Any bid under your max rate can qualify, and you can exclude hazmat or any load with special requirements. Anything outside your criteria still routes to a human. When a bid qualifies, Augie verifies the dispatcher, collects truck, driver, and trailer information, assigns the carrier to the load in your TMS, and sends the rate con to the dispatcher. Augie can send through Highway if you run rate confirmations there.

With end-to-end booking, Augie books the load while the carrier is still on the phone or in the thread, so no human sits between the bid and the booking.

Inbound carrier support

The problem: Carriers call and email around the clock. Someone on your team has to answer them 24/7, whether an after-hours rep or a BPO. Many of those questions block the shipment from moving forward. Slow answers turn into late loads. We built inbound carrier support to supplement track and trace and take that queue off your reps.

How it works: Augie answers carrier questions about appointment details, load information, or anything else you permit it to share. In your SOP, you define whom Augie may answer and when. Before Augie shares any load information, the caller has to verify by MC number or a phone number lookup, so bad actors never get load details.

Augie also works accessorials. When a carrier flags a lumper, detention, OS&D, or a breakdown, Augie classifies the issue and collects the necessary information. That way, lumper claims include the receipt and the amount the driver paid, and detention claims include the arrival time. Augie logs the activity to your TMS, requests any missing paperwork from the carrier, and packages the claim for your customer rep so that they can request reimbursement from the shipper.

Your team stops the one-at-a-time support work so you can focus on the loads that need human judgment.

Invoice audit

The problem: Every carrier invoice needs to be reviewed before you can bill the load. A rep has to open the invoice, find the load, and compare the amount to the rate. Clean invoices wait in the same queue as the messy ones. Invoice audit builds on the POD collection workflow many of our customers already run.

How it works: Augie already requests the POD after delivery. With invoice audit, Augie requests the carrier invoice at the same time, then extracts the invoice amount and compares it to the rate on the load in your TMS. If the numbers differ, Augie chases the carrier for an explanation or a corrected invoice. If they match, Augie logs the audit and the documents it received so that the load is ready to bill in your TMS.

Clean loads bill faster because nobody has to touch them, and your team only has to review the loads with a discrepancy. For those exception cases, Augie has already gathered the paperwork and started the conversation with the carrier.

AP inquiry handling

The problem: Today your AP team fields thousands of emails and calls a day. For each communication, a rep has to open the TMS, find the load, check the status, and reply. Slow answers to these communications hurt your credibility with carriers and factoring companies.

How it works: Augie reviews the emails in your AP inboxes and answers AP calls. For a payment status question, Augie looks up the load and, in parallel, confirms that the carrier or factoring company on the load is the one who asked. Augie pulls the invoice received date and your company, customer, and carrier payment policies, then replies with the date the carrier should expect payment. Rate verification follows the same path.

Carriers get an answer right away at any hour. Your AP team keeps the exceptions and spends its time on stronger carrier and factoring company relationships.

Custom workflow builder

Your team can now build and edit its own workflows in the Augment platform. To begin, you describe the workflow in plain English, the same way you would brief an employee who just joined. Augie asks clarifying questions and course-corrects depending on your answers. Any workflow you build connects to your TMS, email, chat, SMS, and external APIs. If the workflow takes calls, the platform provisions a phone number, and you pick a voice from the library. You run a test, review the result, and publish. You can add guardrails for specific customers or carriers the same way you would for a traditional workflow.

Today, customers are already using the custom workflow builder to read incoming carrier emails, look up the rate through an SMC3 connector, and reply to the carrier. The options are truly endless.

On our fall product recap, we built and launched a workflow in under three minutes. Now you can too. Watch the replay.

Watch the full fall product recap

On our fall product recap, we demoed the workflows above and answered questions on launch timelines, TMS integrations, and guardrails. If you want to see these workflows on your own freight, book a personalized demo. Current customers can ask their account team to turn on any new workflow today.