FourKites announced Booking Connect for Ocean, what is dubbed to be the industry's first fully agentic ocean freight booking platform.
Part of the FourKites Intelligent Control Tower, Booking Connect automates the contract management, carrier selection, documentation, and exception handling that global shippers have historically outsourced to intermediaries.
"Ocean freight booking has been stuck in the manual era for decades," says Matt Elenjickal, CEO and founder of FourKites. "Booking Connect changes the economics. The AI ingests your contracts, shops the rate, picks the carrier, books the voyage, manages the documents, and handles exceptions. The work that used to require a team of people now runs autonomously."
Key takeaways:
· Booking Connect eliminates that labor layer with integrated capabilities.
AI-Powered Contract Management. Booking Connect ingests and digitizes ocean carrier rate agreements, automatically parsing base rates, surcharges, accessorial fees, and FAK (Freight All Kinds) provisions into a complete digital rate profile. Every carrier comparison reflects negotiated rates, not list prices.
AI-Powered Carrier Selection and Autonomous Booking. Booking Connect recommends carriers across four dimensions: cheapest, fastest, optimal (weighted cost and transit time), and network intelligence, which factors historical schedule reliability and lane-level benchmarks. Each recommendation includes a transparent rationale, contracted cost breakdown, transit duration, and cutoff dates. Admins can configure thresholds and bookings within defined parameters execute without human intervention. Rules are entered as natural-language instructions which the AI interprets and applies across every booking.
AI-Powered Document Management. The system automates the document lifecycle from booking confirmation through customs clearance, tracking required documents by route, mode, carrier, and commodity classification. It assigns ownership, triggers overdue follow-ups, routes completed documents to reviewers, and maintains a complete audit trail.
AI-Powered Exception Management. Booking Connect monitors every booking through three stages: booking initiated, carrier confirmation, and shipment creation. Rejected bookings surface alternatives immediately and can re-book within pre-configured rules. Tracking begins automatically upon confirmation, with milestone visibility from port of loading through final delivery.
Closed-Loop Orchestration. Booking Connect integrates directly with Order Twin, Inventory Twin, and Shipment Twin inside Intelligent Control Tower. When Inventory Twin detects a projected stockout and recommends a stock transfer, that signal flows directly into Booking Connect for autonomous carrier selection and booking. Once confirmed, Shipment Twin picks up tracking automatically with no manual handoffs.
Built on Production AI Already at Scale. Booking Connect extends the agentic architecture already running at Fortune 500 companies.
