Vooma secures $16.6m in funding to build the leading AI agents for logistics
Schedule a 30-minute product demo with expert Q&A.
For freight brokers, embracing AI technology isn’t optional — it’s the driver behind exceptional customer experiences and long-term growth. But with so many AI options on the market, it’s easy to make price the deciding factor.
The appeal of lower-priced AI tools is obvious. Every dollar saved increases ROI potential, especially if the tool delivers effective automation. But that’s rarely the case.
The hidden costs of “cheap” AI solutions add up quickly. Implementation delays, poor adoption, and limited functionalities drain hundreds of thousands in lost productivity and revenue. To avoid these pitfalls, here’s how to assess AI investments based on their total cost of ownership — not just the initial investment.
Freight brokerages are under pressure to do more with less. Fragmented workflows, thin margins, and rising customer expectations demand higher efficiency and operational resilience — and the fastest way to unlock both is with AI technology.
Choosing a vendor should be easy — pick a platform, turn it on, see results — but it rarely plays out that way. Most offerings look the same on the surface and make the same promises — so the meaningful differences are harder to spot. In this crowded AI market, leaders often default to the “safe” move: the cheapest option.
This decision feels responsible in the moment. Low-cost tools cut the overhead, giving reps more room to price aggressively without hurting their margins. Plus, it’s easier to win leadership buy‑in and spin up a pilot when the ask is small and the risk feels contained.
But the “lowest cost” path rarely stays cheap. Short‑term savings mask bigger, longer‑term costs — and your growth momentum eventually plateaus.
The sticker price of a “cheap” AI tool is only the beginning. Hidden costs pile up in integration, maintenance, and unrealized ROI — often turning the lowest bid into the most expensive option.
The costs that show up on the P&L start accruing long before the AI tool goes live. Because most “cheap” AI tools don’t support clean integrations, implementing them often turns into a full‑time project. If it ties up two employees for six months, it’s already effectively added their salaries for that period as extra costs — roughly $50-100k.
Because low‑cost tools shift complexity onto internal teams through limited configurability, light support, and DIY integrations, they also require careful change management and process redesigns. These initiatives alone land in the high five‑figure range.
And if the rollout stalls or the tool can’t meet real‑world requirements? “Rescue” projects can run 150%–200% of the original implementation due to reconfiguration and downtime.
Automation delays lead to massive unrealized ROI. Beyond time and resources, teams lose opportunities to deepen relationships, enter new markets, and take on strategic initiatives that grow the business.
A single manual task can ripple across the day, multiplying touches and fragmenting operations. For instance, load builds take close to half an hour when done by hand, and just a few minutes with an automated tool. At 3,000 loads, roughly 1,000 hours are poured into TMS data entry — time that could be rerouted to customer conversations and complex scheduling.
But it’s never just one workflow. Every load, quoting, or scheduling break causes downstream delays, dragging on service and margin.
Comprehensive, well-built AI-powered platforms unlock dramatic ROI. These solutions are designed for real-world complexity, so they deploy seamlessly and deliver real value — in just a fraction of the time.
For example, when Whitewater Freight found themselves flooded with carrier calls, they implemented AI agents to streamline call coverage — with significant returns. The agent now processes all calls and negotiates freight, recording nearly 900 offers a week while freeing reps to focus on customer relationships.
Results like these are achievable with the right platform. Here’s how to find it.
Treat buying an AI platform like investing in an insurance policy. Technology moves so fast that the real question isn’t how today’s features stack up — it’s whether your partner’s roadmap and velocity will keep you ahead of the curve.
Choosing a high-performing team that keeps advancing will compound your returns. These partners deliver rapid enhancements that consistently boost win rates, throughput, and labor savings — turning AI from a one‑time implementation into a continuous advantage.
Take a shipper who needs to extract data from PDF orders. By the time a “cheap” solution is implemented, a reliable freight partner might already be automating load-building and pushing details into the TMS.
Select a partner that will mold their solution to fit your workflows, daily realities, and long-term goals. Picking a cheap AI solution could cost you your competitive advantage.
These tools struggle to understand your operational nuances. Without this context, they force reps to make manual adjustments that take just as much time as their original methods. And when the ROI doesn’t show up, teams abandon the platform.
For instance, poorly built tools may work for some quotes, but they can’t handle the variance that brokers see every day. Robust solutions, on the other hand, are designed to tackle complex scenarios and capture tribal knowledge, so they drive consistent value and business impact.
Solutions with clean interfaces and straightforward functionality minimize integration headaches and disruption. They’re easier to adopt and train on — and improve daily productivity.
Low-cost solutions meant to streamline existing processes often add an extra layer — further complicating daily operations. Reps end up spending more time switching between multiple systems and building workarounds, shrinking bandwidth and revenue per head.
Take a dispatcher who needs to update a delivery time. Bloated software buries core functions under layers of menus, causing delays and mistakes. Well-built freight solutions will automate this process, pushing those changes directly to the TMS and sending a notification to every stakeholder.
A polished demo is functionally equivalent across platforms. That’s why you should pressure-test with your actual data and workflows, not pre-set scenarios.
Short demos with clean test cases hide how a tool handles (or can’t handle) messy documents, exceptions, and real operational nuance. Without testing in your environment, you risk buying a system that breaks down the moment it meets everyday freight challenges.
For example, a demo can show how a tool sends basic email spot quotes. But real-world testing will reveal whether it can distinguish auction notifications from quote requests and send reliable Outlook inbox alerts.
Unlike low-cost solutions, Vooma delivers comprehensive AI-powered software tailored to the complexity of the freight industry. The platform unlocks higher efficiency, better win rates, and measurable, compounding benefits through:
Top brokerages like Zengistics, Direct Traffic Solutions, and ShipNova have realized substantial ROI with Vooma: 6x faster quoting, 93%+ automation on load entry, and thousands of hours returned annually.
Ready to turn AI into ROI? See Vooma in action.
