Ask a pricing team where an RFP's time goes and you'll rarely hear "rating". You'll hear about the hunt.
The inbox hunt. Requests arrive in email bodies, spreadsheets and exports from a shipper's own systems. They sit for a day or two before anyone opens them properly.
The cleanup. Every shipper's file is different. Zip codes are missing, weights live on one tab and pallets on another, ship dates are blank. Before you can price a single lane, someone rebuilds the spreadsheet.
The back and forth. Missing data means emailing the shipper, waiting, and starting again. A week can pass before you even know what you're pricing.
The lookup. Rates live in contracts in different formats: per mile, per pallet, per hundredweight, PDFs and spreadsheets.
The gaps. Some lanes have no carrier at all, so it's calls and emails to find one.
By the time pricing starts, the deadline is close and the team is rushing, which is exactly when mistakes and missed RFPs happen.
What changes with AI
AI agents can take in every request the moment it arrives, standardize every file into one template, flag what's missing and draft the note to the shipper, then price every lane against your contracts through your TMS API. Your team spends its time on decisions: which carrier, what margin, how to win.
One of our customers, a non-asset 3PL, went from about four weeks to under a day on a complex RFP.
Want to see it on your own data? Send us your hardest RFP from last season.
See how KnowRFP does it: KnowRFP
