AI for Magaya. Carrier replies triaged across every mode.

Why Magaya teams need an AI triage layer

Magaya is one of the most complete platforms available for freight forwarders running both international and domestic shipments. Its WMS, customs documentation, and accounting modules mean a Magaya customer rarely needs a second system for the operational side of their freight business.

What Magaya does not do is read the carrier and agent emails arriving in the broker's Gmail after a load is posted. For a domestic trucking load, that means 30–50 trucking-company replies with rates and availability hitting one inbox, none of it scored or ranked. For an international shipment, it means ocean-carrier and forwarding-agent quotes arriving in a separate thread with no automatic cross-check against the shipment in Magaya.

Keelway is the AI overlay that closes both gaps. We connect to your Gmail and to Magaya's REST API. Carrier replies are extracted, scored for domestic FMCSA compliance, ranked, and surfaced as a prioritized shortlist. When you confirm a carrier, the record writes back into Magaya automatically. Nothing leaves Magaya; we just feed it the decision you already made.

Multi-mode handling for forwarder and 3PL teams

Magaya customers rarely run a single mode. A typical team handles ocean imports, domestic drayage, LTL consolidation, and FTL spot freight out of the same office, often with the same brokers switching modes throughout the day. Keelway is built for that reality:

• Domestic trucking emails get full FMCSA trust scoring — operating authority, insurance, safety rating, crash history, out-of-service percentage, and MC age.
• International carrier and agent emails get rate extraction and reply ranking. Keelway surfaces the quoted rate, flags the carrier or agent name, and puts the reply in the shortlist so your team isn't digging through an unstructured inbox at 4pm.
• Dual-mode carriers — trucking companies that also handle drayage or cross-border — get FMCSA checks applied to their domestic MC, even when they respond to an international inquiry.

The two reply streams appear in separate sections of the Keelway triage view. Domestic and international are not mixed into the same ranked list, so brokers are comparing like with like.

Freight forwarding email triage

Forwarders live in a shared inbox. A single import file generates a long tail of email — the booking confirmation, the pre-alert, the arrival notice, the customs broker thread, the drayage quotes, and the domestic delivery carrier replies — all landing in Gmail against one Magaya shipment. Software for freight forwarders has historically stopped at the operational record; the inbox stayed manual.

Keelway is the freight forwarding email triage layer that closes that gap. Every inbound message is matched to its Magaya shipment by reference number, classified by type, and surfaced where it belongs:

• Arrival notices and pre-alerts are matched to the open shipment, with ETA, vessel or flight, and container/AWB pulled out so the team can schedule the delivery leg immediately.
• Ocean and air agent quotes are extracted and ranked in the international section — rate, agent name, and delivery window visible without opening every thread.
• Domestic delivery and drayage replies get full FMCSA trust scoring on the carrier's MC before anyone calls back.

The result: the forwarder works one ranked queue per shipment instead of a 200-message inbox. If your operation straddles both worlds, the freight broker vs. freight forwarder guide explains where the workflows diverge and where Keelway covers both. And because Keelway also reads the bills and invoices on the accounting side, the AP automation add-on extends the same inbox triage to carrier and agent invoices.

What Keelway adds to your Magaya stack

A day in a Magaya + Keelway operation

Your morning starts with 15 open shipments — a mix of ocean imports moving to domestic delivery, three FTL spot loads, and an LTL consolidation. Without Keelway, the broker assigned to the FTL spot loads spends the first 90 minutes of the day reading emails, looking up MCs on the FMCSA website, and sorting replies into a spreadsheet.

With Keelway, that same broker opens the triage view at 8:30am and sees all three loads already ranked. The top-five carriers per load are there, with rates and trust scores. Two carriers across the three loads show amber flags — one has an insurance gap, one is a known-flagged MC from a previous double-broker incident. Both are moved to the bottom of the list automatically. The broker calls back the top carrier on each load, confirms rates, and is on the next task by 9:15am.

International shipments run in parallel. Agent quotes on the ocean import land in the same Gmail inbox. Keelway surfaces them in the separate international section of the triage view — extracted rates, agent names, and delivery windows visible without opening 12 email threads. Your forwarding team picks the best quote and confirms.

How Keelway connects to Magaya

1. Reply address. Keelway issues a hosted reply address instead of requesting read and label permissions on your broker Gmail account. No Outlook required. No dedicated inbox. Works alongside the existing inbox your team already uses.
2. Magaya API keys. Keelway uses Magaya's REST API for shipment read access and write-back. We request the minimum scopes: shipment metadata and carrier/contact records. We do not access billing, accounting, or customs documentation.
3. Ranking calibration. During the first week, Keelway learns your weighting from your last 30 days of accepted quotes. Forwarder teams often weight on-time history and cross-border compliance differently than a pure domestic broker — the model adapts.
4. Write-back activation. After ranking runs live for a few days, you turn on write-back. From that point, accepted carriers flow into Magaya automatically.

How this compares to other Magaya integrations

Magaya has a marketplace of integrations for rate management, customs, accounting, and track-and-trace. Keelway sits in a different lane — the carrier-reply inbox, the inbound email stream that Magaya's own modules do not process.

If you are evaluating dedicated carrier vetting tools and comparing options like Parade, see the Parade alternative page for a side-by-side breakdown. For the full Keelway capability set independent of TMS, see Carrier Email Automation. Brokers on other TMSs can compare the Tai TMS and McLeod integration pages for similar write-back workflows.

For pricing, see the pricing page. For brokers and forwarders evaluating Keelway as part of a broader automation strategy, the Brokers solution page covers the full decision context.