Freight is one of the few operations where the value of an AI system is verified by somebody other than the vendor selling it. A recovered cargo claim is a dollar a carrier decided to pay after previously saying no. A billing cycle is a timestamp in your own TMS. That external verification is exactly why we will work in this vertical without an upfront fee.
Where the measurable money sits
1. Damage evidence at the dock door
Cargo claims are usually lost on evidence rather than on liability. The claim needs proof that freight was intact at one handoff and damaged at the next. In practice, the delivery receipt gets signed clean because the driver is waiting, photos live on somebody's phone with no timestamp or PRO number attached, and by the time the damage is noticed the chain of custody is unprovable.
Fixed cameras at dock doors solve the boring part: every pallet is photographed and timestamped against the shipment reference automatically, whether or not anyone remembers. That gives you an evidence packet for claims that would otherwise be denied, and - the larger number in most operations - it surfaces claim-eligible damage that currently goes unfiled entirely.
For scale, the 2025 Flock Freight Shipper Research Study, surveying 1,000 shippers, put the LTL damage rate at 1.24%, about one shipment in eighty, with an average LTL damage claim of $1,796. Carrier-level variance is enormous, with some reporting under 0.1%, so your own claim history is the only number that matters for scoping.
2. Days-to-invoice, not OCR accuracy
Freight document processing is a solved problem technically and an unsolved one operationally. General-purpose multimodal models now read a bill of lading well enough that nobody should pay a premium for extraction accuracy. What still costs real money is the cycle: documents that arrive out of order, invoices that sit because a POD is missing, rate confirmations that silently disagree with what got billed.
So we do not sell you OCR. We build the matching and exception workflow, and we attach the fee to days-to-invoice - a date already stamped in your TMS, which you control and we cannot influence except by actually shortening it.
3. Exceptions nobody has time to chase
Detention and demurrage that were never billed, accessorials that were absorbed, appointment misses that became a chargeback, shipments quietly aging past their claim filing window. These are individually small and collectively significant, and they are precisely the work that gets dropped when the team is busy. Agents that watch for them and assemble the paperwork convert dropped revenue into billed revenue.
Why we like this vertical for performance pricing
Most "AI saves you money" claims are unverifiable because the vendor and the client are both estimating the savings. Freight is different in one specific way: the carrier decides whether to pay the claim, and the payment shows up in your AR. We cannot inflate that number, you do not have to trust our arithmetic, and there is nothing to argue about at settlement time. When we say we will take a share of recovered dollars, that is a genuinely falsifiable promise.
What this is not
- Not a TMS replacement. We build alongside what you run, usually starting as a parallel evidence system with no write access to your systems at all.
- Not a capital project. Dock cameras at a known choke point with controlled lighting is the cheapest infrastructure in industrial computer vision. If a proposal requires you to buy substantial hardware before anything is proven, that is a bad deal regardless of who offers it.
- Not worker surveillance. We build these systems worker-anonymous by construction: no face, no gait, no biometric identifier, ever. That is partly ethics and partly risk management - biometric privacy litigation is an existential expense for a company our size, and camera systems that feel like monitoring get sabotaged by the people who have to work next to them.
- Not for you if your claim volume is tiny. If you file a handful of claims a year, the honest answer is a better checklist and a phone camera, and we will tell you that on the call.
How an engagement starts
- Free audit. We look at your claim history, denial reasons, and billing cycle, and tell you which of the three levers above is worth the most in your operation - with a number attached.
- Written measurement agreement. The metric, the baseline, the attribution method, our percentage, and the cap. Signed before anything is built.
- Build and deploy at no upfront fee to you.
- You pay from what it recovers. If nothing moves, you owe no performance fee.
Full mechanics, including how the baseline and the cap work, are on our pricing page.