BCO DIY 2.0: Hands-Free Forwarding - We Built It. It Works.
Here is what I'm going to discuss at the Descartes Systems Group Innovation Forum in Chicago tomorrow.
AI agents in logistics are becoming a bloodbath of data aimed primarily at primitive use cases.
I've seen versions of this story for the past 10 years.
True innovation in logistics has too often been mixed with marketing and the outsourcing of cheap labor to simulate scale.
Now a similar pattern is appearing around AI agents.
A substantial number of use cases currently marketed as "exceptions" can already be triggered and routed automatically without AI. A vessel delay that shifts the ETA, a rolled booking, an approaching cut-off, a missing shipping instruction: these are events with known rules and known owners. Detecting them and routing them to the right person is workflow logic, not intelligence. And the genuinely difficult exceptions are still handled by people.
That is exactly why I'm proud of what we have built at Skypace over the past five years and where we are going next.
Agents will absolutely become part of logistics operations. They will read emails, interpret documents, work with shipment events and interact with operational systems.
But before intelligence becomes useful, it needs somewhere reliable to operate.
That means clean data, structured workflows and access to the actual transportation process.
This is where our work started.
For years, ocean freight data came through a strange combination of carrier portals, terminal systems, emails, spreadsheets, EDI messages, APIs and different data structures.
Carrier data, terminal data, schedules, bookings, documents and shipment events rarely behaved like one system.
We had to normalize that reality ourselves while the industry was gradually moving toward common standards.
As the infrastructure evolved, we evolved with it.
Standards such as Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA) Booking, Bill of Lading and Track & Trace started creating a more common structure around processes that had historically been fragmented across carriers and systems.
That allowed us to keep rebuilding parts of our architecture as the underlying industry changed. Today Skypace works across the DCSA standard set, with 12 of the largest ocean carriers connected.
And this is one reason staying bootstrapped for this period mattered to us.
We could build against the reality in front of us.
Our product changed as the industry changed.
Our understanding of the problem changed as we operated inside it.
The Skypace we originally started building for small and midsize businesses is very different from the platform we operate today.
Over the last two years, we pushed what we call BCO-DIY much further.
And this part is important because DIY in logistics can easily be misunderstood.
It does not mean asking a shipper to become its own system integrator.
A shipper should not need to build and maintain API connections with every ocean carrier, terminal, vendor, supplier, contractor or internal team involved in its supply chain.
An energy company should not have to connect every EPC contractor individually.
A retailer should not need another integration project every time a supplier, carrier or service provider enters the process.
Skypace takes responsibility for that layer.
We connect the carriers.
We normalize the data.
We connect the workflows.
We bring the operational information together.
And we give the shipper one environment in which the work can actually happen.
This principle has influenced the way I think about product development for a long time.
Throughout my career in logistics and technology, I have been inspired by people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk because of the way they approached complicated systems.
The customer should not need to understand all of the complexity behind the product in order to use it.
That idea matters enormously in logistics.
BCO-DIY gives the shipper control without forcing the shipper to inherit the integration problem.
And it becomes even more important as AI agents evolve.
Agents will need structured shipment events, documents, schedules, booking information, operational history and reliable context.
Putting increasingly capable agents directly on top of fragmented carrier portals, emails, spreadsheets and inconsistent integrations creates another expensive technology problem.
Companies can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars connecting that environment, months implementing it and much more through lost productivity when the integrations do not behave as expected. And the implementation fee is only the visible part. The shipper then has to fund the internal team and systems needed to keep those connections alive.
Or the intelligence can operate on top of a normalized logistics layer where the underlying ecosystem has already been connected.
That is what we have spent the last five years building.
And that work became what we now call Hands Free Forwarding.
Hands Free Forwarding connects ocean carrier booking, Bill of Lading preparation, shipment tracking, access to ocean booking data and real-time document exchange between the parties involved in transportation.
Instead of working across ten different ocean carrier websites, customers can operate through one platform.
They can book shipments, prepare documentation, follow the transportation process and exchange information without constantly moving data from one disconnected system into another.
That reduces manual data entry.
It reduces errors.
It reduces the amount of carrier-specific training required inside logistics teams.
And in 85% of port-to-port and ramp shipments, Skypace people do not touch the shipment at all.
The shipper books it.
The shipper prepares the documentation.
The shipper manages the process inside the system.
Our logistics team stays behind the platform and steps in when something genuinely requires human intervention: disputes, and the events that no party's system endpoint can process on its own.
We achieved this without using a single AI agent to run the process.
And we have already removed around 85% of the manual work our staff would traditionally perform when arranging an ocean shipment for a customer.
Here is what that means in practice. A traditional ocean shipment used to take about two hours of human work. That covered initiating the booking, re-keying data from emails into carrier systems, then into the TMS and accounting, coordinating with the shipper and the customer, preparing the Bill of Lading by hand, updating statuses, sending alerts, assessing risks and handling escalations.
Today, in 85% of shipments, that work is reduced to about 15 minutes of supervision while the operations team monitors statuses. The remaining 15% are cases such as containers unavailable at the depot or bookings that need correction, and those take 30 to 40 minutes, including escalations. On average, that is under 20 minutes per shipment instead of two hours.
While much of the industry is cutting staff under the banner of AI, we are growing, and automation is what makes that growth possible.
That is an important distinction for me.
Automation should remove work.
Technology should reduce the number of things people need to touch, copy, check and repeat.
AI can become incredibly powerful once that foundation exists.
Our second year of piloting Hands Free Forwarding has now received positive feedback from two customer groups: enterprise BCOs and freight forwarders across more than 50 countries. More than 200 organizations have joined the pilot, and around 40 of them have already become active customers, including one of Denmark's largest energy companies. They span oil and gas, sustainable energy, automotive, food, dried fruit and nuts, glass, chemicals, manufacturing, clothing retail and NVOCCs.
And working this way forced us to rethink something larger.
We were changing more than the way people interact with logistics software.
We had to rethink what freight forwarding itself looks like commercially, operationally and technologically.
You cannot build a Tesla by taking a traditional car, removing a few mechanical parts, adding a battery and calling it innovation.
Once the architecture changes, the way the entire system works changes with it.
Freight forwarding is the same.
When customers can book, prepare documents, track shipments, exchange data and manage a large part of the transportation process directly, the commercial structure changes.
The operational structure changes.
The role of the forwarder changes.
The technology changes the workflow.
The workflow changes the operation.
And eventually, the operation changes what a freight forwarder is.
That is where the next stage of Skypace becomes particularly interesting.
My personal goal now until the end of the coming winter is to turn our website into an external processing layer for the aggregated experience of our teams and the intelligence already built into our main platform.
I want the same operational infrastructure behind our freight forwarding business to become useful outside of an individual shipment.
That means free tools for shippers covering ocean freight, schedules, vessels, customs, documentation, trade data and eventually trade financing. We will share the details of trade financing later, but the direction is open.
Real logistics operations continuously improve the platform.
The platform continuously improves the tools.
And those tools bring more companies into the operating environment.
The next step is distribution.
We are expanding Skypace with the two groups that have already shaped the product with us: BCOs and freight forwarders.
For BCOs, that means giving their teams a more direct way to work with ocean freight.
For freight forwarders, it means giving their teams and customers access to the same technology inside their daily operations.
More BCOs.
More freight forwarders.
More of the ocean freight workflow running through the same infrastructure.
And eventually, more AI operating on top of clean logistics data instead of trying to make sense of chaos.
We built the infrastructure.
Now we release it.
Stage Two begins.
At some point, I don't want to care whether Skypace is number one on Google. I want it to be #1 for your employees, your customers, and your agents.
#Logistics #FreightForwarding #AI #DCSA #SupplyChain
Read the article by Vlad Nikalayeu on LinkedIn.
