Automate Rate Sourcing and Quote Building with Starboard Autonomous Mode
Your Quoting Team Starts Work at 9 AM. Your Customers Needed an Answer at 3 AM.
You get a quote request from a shipper in Shenzhen at 2 AM Central Time. The email sits untouched for six hours. When the pricing team finally opens their inbox at 8, that request is buried under dozens of others. They triage. They prioritize. They start sourcing rates — but by then, a competitor has already replied. The deal is gone before anyone touches a spreadsheet.
This is not an edge case. For all forwarders handling international volume, it's the default. Quote requests don’t wait for your workday. The gap between “received” and “sent” is where you lose the deal.
Starboard’s new Autonomous Mode was built to close that gap.
The Morning Bottleneck
Most pricing teams start their day the same way: scanning the inbox, sorting requests by urgency, and deciding what to work on first. Triage alone can eat 30 to 45 minutes before a single rate gets sourced.
Once they do start quoting, the process is manual and linear. Read the request. Pull up carrier contract files. Calculate applicable rates. And if you don’t have rates? Email carriers one by one and wait for the responses to trickle in. Once they do, you waste time sifting through emails to remember which threads belong to which quote so you can compare rates, pick the best one, and then build the quote.
Experienced pricing agents might handle this in an hour per quote on a clean day. Multiply that by the volume a mid-sized forwarder sees, and the math stops working.
What Autonomous Mode Does
Autonomous Mode runs inside your existing inbox. When a quote request arrives — whether that's at 2 PM or 2 AM — Starboard detects it automatically and starts working.
It extracts shipment details: origin, destination, cargo type, weight, dimensions, any special requirements. Then it emails your authorized and preferred carriers on your behalf, requesting rates. As carriers respond, Starboard ingests those rates and compares them against your existing contract rates — all of them, not just the two or three you'd have time to check manually.
By the time your pricing team sits down in the morning, the work is done. Rates are sourced, compared, and ranked. A draft quote is built with pricing, terms, and conditions. The agent's job is no longer "do all the manual work." It's "review and approve."
Open inbox. Confirm. Send.
What Actually Changes
Speed. A request that arrives at midnight gets a response by 9:30 AM instead of noon. That alone wins deals that would have gone to a faster competitor.
Sourcing Quality. Because Autonomous Mode contacts all your preferred carriers on every request — not just the ones you'd have time to reach — you see the full picture. Your team stops settling for the first rate that looks acceptable and starts sending quotes built on the best available option.
Increased Capacity. When the repetitive work — reading emails, emailing carriers, comparing spreadsheets, drafting PDFs — happens automatically, one pricing agent covers the volume that used to require several. Your team spends their time on judgment calls, customer relationships, and complex shipments that actually need a human eye.
The Job Changes Shape
Starboard Autonomous Mode isn't about replacing your pricing team. It's about changing what they spend their hours on. We handle the repetitive data entry and carrier communication in the background, while the team focuses on reviewing, approving, and handling the exceptions — the work that actually requires expertise.
For forwarders running lean teams, that means handling more volume without hiring. For larger operations, it means redeploying experienced people to higher-value work instead of burying them in repetitive quoting.
See It in Your Inbox
Autonomous Mode is live now. If you want to see what your morning inbox looks like when the quoting is already done, book a demo and we'll walk through it with your actual workflow.