An estimated 20% of shippers use artificial intelligence today, says Alexandra Griffon, co-founder and chief executive officer of BlueCargo, but as many as 60% are expected to do so in the next few years.

Quoting speakers at the Manifest trade show in Las Vegas, Griffon says companies using AI are three times more efficient than those that don’t, and those that aren’t will die, missing out on some $1.5 trillion in supply-chain cost savings over time. “The opportunity is massive.”

Freight auditing is an area where AI can have a big impact, Griffon says. “Eighty percent of the market still performs freight audits manually, reviewing every line item of the invoice, which is very cumbersome.”

Current solutions that match invoices, rates and contractual terms are “static and basic,” Griffon says. AI, much more dynamic, can look at many more parameters. “A dynamic audit is when you track containers through the whole journey, encompassing every movement, to actually check the data to see who was responsible, if there was a latency in the process, was a terminal closed, and did a trucker not have enough spots in the yard? So what's the root cause that caused that fee?”

The four main areas where AI can streamline audits are in document processing, rights management, the claims process and vendor negotiation and management. “Having those insights in the data to the line-item level tells you that this line was not performing well, [and] how can I have a strategy conversation?” she says. Imagine those four AI agents working together and really building a freight audit.”

Griffon says a company can implement AI in 90 days if it identifies key initiatives and goals to achieve, establishes a budget, and starts testing. Also, “No supply-chain company is going to build a better structural model than OpenAI. So just use the models that are existing.”