Your supply chain doesn’t stop at 6pm. Neither does the monitoring.
The bottleneck was never intelligence — your team knows what to do about a customs hold. It’s attention: nobody can watch all several thousand shipments at 06:12 on a Tuesday. An agent can.
Carrier milestone: discharged Long Beach, 06:12 PT
Customs status unchanged 41h — exam hold
Free time expires in 2 days · demurrage risk
Downstream: PO 4471-08 promised Memphis DC Thu
A customs exam is holding MSKU 418 226 3.
Two days of free time left. If it clears Wed the
Thursday promise on PO 4471-08 still holds.
If not: expedite drayage, or re-promise Friday.
Owner assigned → Import Ops, Memphis
Broker chase task created, due 14:00
Drayage pre-booked, cancellable to Wed 18:00
Customer service notified — no promise change yet
Every step above is logged, attributed, and reversible. A human can take it back at any point.
A representative exception, not customer data. The agents, and the order they run in, are real.
A working agent, running the loop. Representative data, not a customer’s.
A loop that never sleeps: detect, explain, act.
Detect · Exception Monitoring Agent
Watches every shipment, unprompted
Milestones, customs status, appointment times and downstream promises, read together — so a container that stops moving is flagged the moment it stops, on the lanes and thresholds you set.
Explain · AI Exception Summary
Writes the brief, so a planner doesn't
What happened, what it threatens, what the options cost — in the four sentences needed to decide, not the twelve tabs it would take to write them.
Act · Workflow Trigger Agent
Fires the playbook, not the alert
Assign the owner, chase the carrier, pre-book drayage, notify the customer, hold the reorder — each a rule you wrote, executed on condition, every one reversible.
Agents that recommend the call — not just raise the flag.
Each one reasons over your carrier history, costs and live network — and proposes a decision, inside the limits you set.
Disruption Impact Agent
Scans weather, port congestion, strikes and geopolitics, maps which of your shipments and orders are exposed, and recommends the pre-emptive move — before it becomes an exception.
Carrier Recommendation Agent
Ranks carrier and mode for each lane from on-time history, tender acceptance and cost — and recommends the booking, not just the options.
Freight Procurement Agent
Benchmarks your contracted rates against the live market and recommends where to re-tender or switch carriers to take cost out.
Recovery & Reroute Agent
When a shipment is at risk, prices expedite, reroute and last-leg trucking against penalty and line-down exposure — then recommends the cheapest way to keep the promise.
Promise-Date Agent
Recommends a delivery date you can actually keep — and when to re-promise — from live network reality, not the catalog lead time.
Replenishment & Rebalancing Agent
Recommends what to reorder and which DC-to-DC transfers to make, weighing carrying cost against the risk and cost of a stockout.
Landed-Cost Sourcing Agent
Compares total landed cost — freight, duty, tariff and handling — across suppliers and routes, and recommends the cheaper path.
Root-Cause Agent
For a line-down risk, it traces the miss to the exact lane, carrier or supplier at fault — the late inbound about to starve the assembly line — and proposes the fix, not just the symptom.
…and a growing library beyond these — every agent scoped, logged and reversible by the rules below.
Autonomy you can take back.
Most supply chain AI stays in pilot not for accuracy, but because nobody wants to explain why software re-promised a customer’s order. So the boundary is explicit — and yours to draw.
Scoped by role and context
Define which actions each agent may take, and for whom. Re-booking cheap drayage isn't re-promising a customer.
Reversible by design
Nothing an agent does is a one-way door. Bookings cancel inside their window; notifications are drafts until a person sends them.
A complete audit trail
Every recommendation, approval and action logged with its inputs. Why was it expedited? The answer is a record, not a recollection.
A $32B hardware distributor swapped manual tracking for continuous monitoring — and stopped hearing about problems from its customers first.
