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A freight inbox that writes its own quotes

A UAE freight forwarder's sales desk retyped rate requests and vendor replies from email into Excel and Word. Quote Desk now reads them as they arrive, compares vendor offers and drafts a branded quotation the customer can accept online. A person checks anything the AI is unsure of.

Client
A UAE freight forwarder
Industry
Logistics & freight
Product
Quote Desk
Timeline
In production since October 2026
Quote DeskDemo data
Quote Desk dashboard with monthly enquiries, quotes and wins, busiest freight lanes and vendor response times, demo data

The situation

The sales and pricing team ran on email. Customers sent enquiries, vendors replied with rates in the body of an email or in attachments, and the desk copied everything into spreadsheets to compare before writing each quotation in Word.

What was broken

  • Rates were retyped two or three times before a customer saw them.
  • Enquiries lived in personal inboxes, so nobody could see who was waiting.
  • Local charges, mixed currencies and VAT per line were done by hand on every quote.
  • Managers saw win rate and margins only at month end.

What we built

  • Inbox reading with a review gate

    Each user connects their own Outlook or Gmail. Quote Desk reads enquiries, vendor replies and attachments into structured records and scores its confidence on every field. Anything below the threshold waits for a person.

  • One shipment spec for every mode

    Sea, air, road, breakbulk, sea-air and services share one spec, so the enquiry, the request to vendors, the quotation and the PDF always agree.

  • A quote maker for UAE charges

    A catalogue of local charges, VAT class and currency per line, live margin, approvals for out-of-policy margins, and a quotation page the customer can accept online.

  • Cost controls on the AI

    A cheap screen before full reads, thread memory, half-price batch reads for doubtful mail and a spend limit that pauses reading instead of failing mail.

How it runs day to day

The desk opens a work queue instead of an inbox: new enquiries, rates that have arrived, quotes to send, quotes and rates about to expire. A rate reply that the AI read with confidence is already on the enquiry; one it was unsure of is highlighted for a person to confirm. Quotes go out from one template as a PDF and a customer page.

Results

emails read by the AI during the production pilotProduction parsing log, to 23 September 2026
1,517
hand-labelled real emails in the accuracy test setEvery cost change is checked against it before it ships
50

What's next

Bringing the AI running cost down toward its daily target without any loss of accuracy on money fields, measured against the same test set.

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Opens an email to info@elitestack.ae with your sentence in it. Or WhatsApp us on +971 56 121 1011.