How Project44’s Procurement Agent is Cutting Freight Spend
Project44 has launched an AI Freight Procurement Agent, a solution designed to automate carrier selection, rate benchmarking and negotiations across various transportation modes.
This tool is built specifically for procurement and transportation leaders and focuses on reducing manual sourcing work whilst potentially strengthening cost control and service performance.
The introduction of this technology represents a potential shift from reactive logistics to autonomous logistics for the sector. According to Deloitte's 2025 Global Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) Survey, top-tier procurement organisations achieve 3.2 times greater returns on AI investments than their peers.
This statistic suggests a growing disparity between organisations that effectively leverage automation and those that do not. For organisations currently relying on spreadsheets to understand why carrier rates have increased whilst service levels have declined, the AI Freight Procurement Agent offers a different approach to freight procurement strategies.
Automating freight sourcing tasks
The agent operates within the Intelligent Transportation Management System (TMS) created by project44. It replaces static bid cycles and spreadsheet-driven negotiations with continuous AI-enabled sourcing that is informed by live market conditions and carrier performance data.
KPMG notes that supply chain disruption remains a top three risk for CEOs through 2026. This new tool addresses such challenges, and suggestions from PwC indicate that "agentic potential" could translate into a 4.1% reduction in freight spend and a 75% collapse in sourcing cycle times.
By automating rate benchmarking, mini-bids and renewal negotiations within defined parameters, the AI Freight Procurement Agent could help shippers secure competitive rates faster.
Operating in parallel, the agent engages the market in seconds rather than hours, potentially capturing savings that manual workflows often miss.
The agent can benchmark contracted rates against current market conditions, identify lanes with savings opportunities, launch digital mini-bids autonomously, evaluate carriers across cost, transit time and service reliability and recommend or execute awards based on configurable business rules.
Benchmarking against market rates
This solution operates on a logistics data graph that connects more than 259,000 carriers and 1.5 billion shipments annually across 186 countries.
The platform processes more than 700 million logistics events each day, continuously validating and enriching carrier and lane performance data.
The agent builds on broader AI agent orchestration capabilities already operating across the platform, with dozens of AI agent use cases embedded across the Decision Intelligence Platform to support core workflows across the supply chain.
"Freight procurement is one of the largest controllable cost drivers in the supply chain," says Jett McCandless, Founder and CEO of project44.
"Intelligent TMS laid the foundation for continuous optimisation. The AI Freight Procurement Agent turns analytics into autonomous action within defined guardrails, delivering measurable savings whilst maintaining full control."
Jett further highlights the intent relative to previous iterations of the technology. In 2024, agents initiated nearly one million automated carrier communications to resolve visibility gaps. The Freight Procurement Agent extends this Multi-Agent Orchestration architecture into sourcing and rate optimisation.
Improving procurement cycle times
The AI Freight Procurement Agent operates within customer-defined policies and approval structures. Organisations determine the authority granted to the agent, including rate thresholds, carrier eligibility and contract parameters.
Within approved limits, the agent can autonomously negotiate renewals. For new carriers or expanded lanes, it provides scenario analysis and recommendations for procurement review. All actions are auditable and supported by transparent data inputs.
Customers can begin in recommendation-only mode and progressively expand automation as confidence is established. Early deployments demonstrate a 4.1% reduction in freight spend through continuous benchmarking and carrier competition.
Customers report up to a 75% reduction in sourcing cycle times and a 70% reduction in manual coordination effort. Where traditional sourcing workflows move sequentially, the AI Freight Procurement Agent operates in parallel, potentially improving speed, consistency and service-level performance at scale.
This could mean that procurement teams spend less time on administrative data entry and more time on strategic decision-making.
