Capacity management is one of the key hurdles that any freight broker working in carrier sales has to navigate. Anthony Sutardja, co-founder of Parade, sat down with John Kingston of FreightWaves to discuss how new AI carrier sales software can find and aggregate capacity as well as streamline transactions. “We build software for freight brokers born out of the dust of digital freight brokerages,” said Sutardja. AI capacity management, as Sutardja calls it, includes everything that the broker needs to understand: what network capacity there is (both internally and externally), where carriers are operating, how brokers and carriers understand and manage capacity, and what relationships carriers have with their brokers. Parade relies on data input from a wide variety of sources, including email correspondence and load board activity.  “With emails, truckers, carriers, and shippers are sending a ton of information, but it’s largely unstructured,” Sutardja said. “Emails come in so many different formats, and most of them go unread because everyone’s inbox is flooded.”Parade started with language processing technology to structure the information from emails into available trucks. “Our customers also wanted a private portal where only invited carriers and brokers could post, and that’s another source of data,” Sutardja said. Traditionally, brokers rely on load boards to gauge capacity. Over the past decade, freight tech companies have also developed tools for truckers themselves to have visibility on capacity, from owner-operators to full fleets. “We integrate with pretty much every single one of these tools to push out freight opportunities to truckers, and in exchange, they also publish capacity back towards us as well,” Sutardja said. Through data gathered by emails, private portals or public load boards, Parade can gain understanding about carriers, what lanes they tend to run, and what trucks they have available.  “We pre-populate all those different data sources into a single pane of glass so our brokers can have a much more transparent, high-level view of capacity,” Sutardja said.A significant portion of loads, however, are not publicly posted. How do carriers communicate, Sutardja asks? They can interact in a portal, they can email, and they can speak on the phone. “A lot of load information has to be surfaced through one-on-one phone calls,” Sutardja said. That’s why Parade launched CoDriver, an AI-powered solution that automates carrier communication for freight brokerages. CoDriver addresses inbound inquiries via email and phone calls and aims to streamline workflows by automating tasks like qualifying carrier inquiries, capturing quotes, and integrating data into a capacity management platform. With Parade’s voice agents, Sutardja says, the AI can act as the broker to carrier sales rep.When a carrier is negotiating a load with a broker, much of the conversation involves simply determining if the carrier is qualified for the load, whether that means appointment availability, asset and hardware compatibility, or lane preference.For these qualifying conversations, CoDriver’s voice agent manages the basic negotiations before handing off the call to an employee for price negotiation.“Without the data, it’s hard to see what that funnel looks like,” said Sutardja. “Between ten and twenty-five percent of conversations result in disqualifications, and another thirty-three percent of those conversations end up giving you data about the load but don’t end up in a deal

Highway’s advanced identity verification and fraud prevention solutions will enhance the digital booking process and expand Parade’s broker networks with rigorously vetted carriers. . .