project44 Launches AI Freight Procurement Agent to Cut Freight Spend and Accelerate Sourcing

New AI agent automates sourcing, benchmarking and negotiations while keeping teams in control.

CHICAGO, Feb. 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- project44 introduced the AI Freight Procurement Agent to automate carrier selection, rate benchmarking and negotiations across modes. Built for procurement and transportation leaders, it reduces manual sourcing work while strengthening cost control and service performance.

Available within project44's Intelligent Transportation Management System, the agent replaces static, periodic bid cycles and spreadsheet-driven negotiations with continuous AI-enabled sourcing informed by live market conditions and carrier performance.

Embedded directly into transportation workflows
The AI Freight Procurement Agent operates within Intelligent Transportation Management, continuously benchmarking contracted rates against changing market rates and evaluating carrier performance by lane. The AI agent selects carriers and ensures negotiated rates flow directly into execution, while shipment outcomes inform future sourcing decisions.

By automating rate benchmarking, mini-bids, and renewal negotiations within defined guardrails, the AI Freight Procurement Agent helps shippers secure competitive rates faster and reinforce carrier performance standards over time. Operating in parallel, the agent engages the market in seconds rather than hours, capturing savings that manual workflows often miss.

Building on project44's Freight Procurement Analytics, the AI Freight Procurement Agent extends insight into execution. The agent can:

• Benchmark contracted rates against current market conditions
• Identify lanes with savings opportunities or elevated spot exposure
• Launch digital mini-bids autonomously
• Evaluate carriers across cost, transit time and service reliability
• Recommend or execute awards based on configurable business rules

Context-fueled intelligence built on the logistics data graph
The AI Freight Procurement Agent operates on project44's logistics data graph, connecting more than 259,000 carriers and 1.5 billion shipments annually across 186 countries. The platform processes more than 700 million logistics events each day, continuously validating and enriching carrier and lane performance data. This scale enables sourcing decisions to reflect verified carrier performance and real-time market conditions rather than static bid data.

Part of project44's Multi-Agent Orchestration
The AI Freight Procurement Agent builds on project44's broader AI agent orchestration capabilities already operating across the platform. Today, dozens of AI agent use cases are embedded across the Decision Intelligence Platform, supporting core workflows across the supply chain.

These agents operate autonomously within defined workflows, proactively detecting and resolving supply chain exceptions at scale. In the past year alone, project44 agents initiated nearly one million automated carrier communications to resolve visibility gaps and improve data quality across the network.

The Freight Procurement Agent extends this Multi-Agent Orchestration architecture into sourcing and rate optimization, applying the same orchestration framework to continuous procurement execution inside Intelligent Transportation Management.

Automation built on governance and trust
The AI Freight Procurement Agent operates within customer-defined policies and approval structures. Organizations determine the authority granted to the agent, including rate thresholds, carrier eligibility, and contract parameters.

Within approved limits, the agent can autonomously negotiate renewals. For new carriers, expanded lanes, or spot opportunities, it provides scenario analysis and recommendations for procurement review. All actions are auditable and supported by transparent data inputs and performance metrics.

Customers can begin in recommendation-only mode and progressively expand automation as operational trust and confidence are established.

Delivering measurable value
Early deployments demonstrate a 4.1 percent reduction in freight spend through continuous benchmarking and carrier competition. By automating carrier outreach, rate retrieval, and bid coordination across thousands of carriers simultaneously, customers report up to a 75 percent reduction in sourcing cycle times and a 70 percent reduction in manual coordination effort.

Where traditional sourcing workflows move sequentially, the AI Freight Procurement Agent operates in parallel, improving speed, consistency, and service-level performance at scale.

"Freight procurement is one of the largest controllable cost drivers in the supply chain," said Jett McCandless, Founder and CEO of project44. "Intelligent TMS laid the foundation for continuous optimization. The AI Freight Procurement Agent turns analytics into autonomous action within defined guardrails, delivering measurable savings while maintaining full control."

Availability
The AI Freight Procurement Agent is available within project44's Intelligent Transportation Management System beginning March 2026. To see a demo, visit project44.com/get-a-demo.

About project44
project44 is the Decision Intelligence Platform you can trust for your modern supply chain. Its context-based AI transforms fragmented logistics management into unified intelligence, bringing certainty to global supply chain operations. With intelligent transportation management, end to end visibility, yard management and last mile solutions, project44 connects over 1.5 billion shipments annually for over 1,000 leading brands in manufacturing, automotive, retail, life sciences, food and beverage, CPG, and oil, chemical and gas. Learn more at project44.com.

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SOURCE project44