AI in Freight Forwarding: How Starboard Is Rethinking the Quote Desk
The freight forwarding industry has no shortage of artificial intelligence promises. Vendors at every conference and in every trade publication claim their platform will transform operations, cut costs, and future-proof any forwarder willing to adopt their solution. But for the thousands of small and mid-sized freight forwarders who make up the backbone of global logistics, the real question has never been whether AI is impressive. The real question is whether it can survive a Monday morning at the quote desk.
That desk is not a clean environment. It is a collision of incoming emails, attached PDFs, outdated spreadsheets, carrier portals with different interfaces, agent responses in a dozen formats, and rate quotes that expire before anyone finishes entering them into a system. Most AI demonstrations never confront that disorder. Starboard, a freight technology startup founded by Sumeet Trehan, is building a platform that does exactly that — and its philosophy about who the technology should serve is just as important as how the technology works.
Why Sumeet Trehan Built Starboard
Trehan's perspective on the freight market was shaped by an unusually broad career. He worked at Maersk, one of the world's largest ocean carriers. He spent time at BCG, advising clients across the logistics sector. And he played a significant role at Flexport, where he helped establish the company's Canadian operations during one of its most aggressive growth periods.
It was at Flexport that Trehan began to ask a question that would eventually lead him to start Starboard: was digital freight actually solving the right problem? The digital freight model, as it emerged in the 2010s, largely bet that replacing traditional forwarders with a streamlined, technology-native business would be the path forward. Trehan came to a different conclusion. He observed that small and mid-sized freight forwarders were not relics waiting to be disrupted. They were deeply embedded in their clients' supply chains, carrying institutional knowledge that no software platform could simply replicate by going direct.
His argument is straightforward: local and regional forwarders are indispensable to global trade. Their operational expertise, their client relationships, and their ability to navigate the informal networks that keep cargo moving through complex corridors represent genuine value. What they often lack is access to the same caliber of technology, procurement leverage, and financial infrastructure that larger competitors enjoy. Starboard's mission is to close that gap.
The Real Challenge: Making AI Work in Messy Conditions
For anyone who has spent time at a freight forwarder's operations desk, the appeal of AI is obvious. Quoting is labor-intensive, time-sensitive, and prone to error. A single shipment request can require gathering rates from multiple carriers, checking surcharges, verifying routing options, calculating margins, and formatting a response — all under time pressure and with the constant risk that a rate will change before the quote goes out.
The problem with many AI tools is that they are built for idealized data. They work well in demonstrations where inputs are structured and consistent. The reality at most forwarders looks nothing like that. Requests arrive in unstructured formats. Carriers communicate through portals, emails, and spreadsheets that were never designed to talk to each other. Agent responses vary in layout and completeness. Any AI solution that cannot handle that variability will create more work than it saves, adding an extra layer of data cleaning and verification on top of an already stretched team.
Starboard's approach is to build AI that is specifically designed to operate in those conditions — processing unstructured inputs, normalizing data from disparate sources, and generating quotes that reflect real market rates with the speed that clients increasingly expect. The goal is not to replace the forwarder's judgment but to handle the repetitive, data-heavy groundwork so that human expertise can be applied where it matters most.
Leveling the Playing Field Without Eliminating the Player
One of the most important aspects of Starboard's philosophy is what it is explicitly not trying to do. Trehan is not arguing that AI will make small forwarders obsolete, nor is he building a platform that would effectively cut them out of the value chain by going direct to shippers. Instead, Starboard positions itself as an infrastructure layer that sits behind the forwarder, making them more competitive without asking them to surrender the client relationships they have spent years building.
This matters because those relationships are not trivial. Small and mid-sized forwarders often serve clients who value personal accountability, local market knowledge, and the kind of responsive service that large logistics networks can struggle to deliver consistently. Those clients are not necessarily looking for the cheapest option. They are looking for a partner they trust. Technology that enhances the forwarder's ability to serve those clients — rather than replacing the forwarder with an algorithm — is a fundamentally different value proposition.
What Better Technology, Procurement, and Financial Infrastructure Actually Means
Starboard's platform is designed to deliver three categories of advantage that have historically been available only to larger players.
- Better technology means access to AI-powered quoting tools that can handle unstructured data at scale, reduce quote turnaround time, and improve pricing accuracy without requiring a large in-house technology team.
- Stronger procurement means that forwarders using the platform can benefit from aggregated buying power, accessing carrier rates that reflect a larger volume base than any individual small forwarder could negotiate on their own.
- Financial infrastructure refers to the longer-term ambition of giving forwarders tools to manage cash flow, credit, and payment terms more effectively — an area where smaller operators have historically been at a significant disadvantage relative to large multinational logistics companies.
Together, these three pillars are intended to give independent forwarders the operational foundation to compete on more equal terms, not by turning them into technology companies, but by making powerful tools accessible without requiring massive investment or in-house expertise.
The Broader Significance for Global Logistics
The freight forwarding industry is more fragmented than most people outside of it realize. While names like DHL, Kuehne+Nagel, and Expeditors dominate headlines and market share rankings, the vast majority of the world's freight moves through smaller, regionally focused operators with deep expertise in specific trade lanes, commodities, or customer segments. These forwarders are not afterthoughts in global commerce. They are frequently the most knowledgeable and responsive option for the small and mid-sized businesses that generate enormous volumes of international trade.
If AI in freight forwarding develops primarily as a tool that consolidates advantage among the largest players, the long-term consequences for the market could be significant — reduced competition, less specialized service, and a logistics sector that is less responsive to the needs of smaller shippers. Starboard's bet is that there is both a commercial opportunity and a structural need to ensure that AI serves the broader market, not just its largest incumbents.
Whether that bet proves correct will depend on execution, adoption, and the pace at which the technology matures. But the underlying argument — that small and mid-sized forwarders deserve access to tools that match their importance to global trade — is one that the industry would do well to take seriously.