Who the Hell Should Use AI?

Last month, Tai and Chain came together for a partner webinar where they asked and answered a pretty loaded question:

How the Hell do I use AI?

Tai’s CEO, Mitch Mitchell, and Chain’s CEO, Annalise Sandhu, spent an hour tackling the questions everyone seems to be asking, but not everyone has answers to.

One of the clearest takeaways from the conversation was this: the companies that get the most out of AI are the ones who’ve done the work to understand their own workflows first. You can’t automate what you haven’t mapped. Before AI can add value, you need clarity on where your time actually goes and how AI can help you overcome specific barriers.

Who The Hell Should Use AI?

The simple answer? Freight brokers and 3PLs whose teams spend meaningful time on repetitive carrier communication, manual carrier research, and data tasks tied to booking and tracking. If your people are doing that work by hand today, AI has an immediate place in your business.

There’s a common misconception that AI is only here to replace entire workforces, remove the human element from customer relationships, and fundamentally change everything overnight.

The companies getting the most value from AI aren’t replacing people; they’re empowering them. These are tasks that were never a good use of human resources in the first place: check calls, carrier outreach, status chasing, rate negotiations, and load tracking. It’s the work that eats labor hours but doesn’t require judgment or critical thinking. It’s also the work that pulls teams away from focusing on what humans are actually great at: building relationships, solving problems, and creating exceptional customer experiences when they are needed most.

The goal shouldn’t be to find ways for AI to replace your workflows. The goal should be to find ways for AI to strengthen them.

Let’s be clear about something: AI is no longer a buzzword. It’s here to stay.

The conversation is no longer if AI will impact your business. It’s when and how.

Your customers are looking for a broker partner who’s responsive, organized, efficient, and willing to invest in technology that improves their experience. Your technology providers should be doing the exact same thing for you, which we’ll get into with proof points below.

That’s one of the reasons we partner closely with Chain.

Like Tai, they’re constantly listening to customer feedback, challenging assumptions, and asking a simple question:

How can we make something that’s already good even better? Because just like you’re doing for your customers, the best solutions partners always look for ways to improve as AI continues to evolve.

The companies that’ll continue to grow won’t be the ones using AI just for its own sake. They’ll be the ones using it intentionally to create better experiences, stronger operations, and more value for their customers… and themselves.

And that’s a future both Tai and Chain are excited to build towards. With that in mind, let’s get specific about where the future is already being realized.

The Tasks Worth Talking About

If you want to get specific (and we think you should), here’s where AI is delivering real, immediate value for brokers and 3PLs right now.

Carrier communication, booking, and tracking

This is the most obvious one, and it’s where Chain started. The volume of outbound communication required to cover and track a load (the calls, emails, texts, and follow-ups) is staggering when done manually. Autopilot handles that end-to-end: carrier vetting, rate negotiation, outreach, booking, check calls, and document retrieval and classification. We built and refined these workflows with our customers before we ever talked about them publicly. Once a load is covered, Chain’s tracking layer aggregates mobile, ELD, and API data and feeds it all to Autopilot. Your team won’t have to chase updates manually or monitor for issues and exceptions. The result isn’t just time saved. It’s that your team stops being a customer service center and starts being a brokerage. As our integration with Tai deepens, the handoff between TMS workflow and AI execution will get tighter, which means less friction and more coverage on both ends.

Load building and order ingestion

This is one of the most underrated time sinks in the business. When a customer sends an order (whether it’s a structured EDI feed or an email with a spreadsheet attached), someone has to interpret it, clean it, and build the load. This is an area where the TMS should be doing the heavy lifting natively, and it’s something Tai solves inside their platform. The data comes in, the load gets built, and your team’s time goes toward moving freight rather than entering it.

RFP processing and rate analysis

When a customer sends a massive RFP, the old process was brutal: hours of manual data work before you could even form a view. Tai is making progress on providing better tools for this inside the platform. However, brokers can develop a simple tool for this on their own. Spreadsheets and customer data can be fed directly into tools like Claude to extract lane volumes, identify patterns, and build a working analysis in a fraction of the time it would take to review the data manually. This is an area where brokers who develop their own process now will have a real advantage over those who don’t.

Internal operations and team efficiency

This is where many people haven’t looked yet. At Chain, we’re using AI-native tools across our own operations: Attio as our CRM with AI-powered workflows; Claude for internal research, contract analysis, and documentation; and Gamma for presentations and QBRs, among others. Chain and Tai both believe you shouldn’t sell something you don’t use. The efficiency gains in our own business are part of how we build better products for yours. That shared philosophy is a big part of why our partnership with Tai works.

The throughline across all of this is the same: AI should take off your team’s plate the work that requires data processing, repetition, and information retrieval, so the humans on your team can focus on the work that actually requires them to be human.

That’s the version of AI adoption worth building toward, and it’s what Chain and Tai are building together.

If you want to learn more about what AI can you for you brokerage click here to download the whitepaper.