AI for Tai TMS. Triaged along the keel.

Why Tai brokers need an AI overlay

Tai is one of the best SMB-to-mid-market TMSs on the market. It ships native load-board posting, carrier management, dispatch, and invoicing in one screen, and its pricing starts around $995/month, which is how it has become the default stack for brokerages doing $5M–$80M in freight.

What Tai does not do, and does not try to do, is read the 40-odd carrier emails that hit your inbox within two hours of you posting a load. That inbound stream is where the actual judgment lives — which carrier to call back, who to decline, who looks like a double-broker — and it is still a pure-manual job in most brokerages running Tai today.

Keelway is the AI overlay for Tai that closes that gap. We do not touch Tai's order-entry or dispatch screens. We just pick up where Tai's carrier workflow ends — the inbox — and write the decision back into the Tai load record once you've made it.

What Keelway adds to Tai

What a week on Tai + Keelway looks like

You post 80 loads a week. Tai posts them to DAT and Truckstop. Each one pulls 30–50 replies. Without Keelway, someone on your team is spending ~30 minutes per load reading threads and cross-checking MCs. With Keelway:

• Every reply is already triaged by the time you look at the load.
• Two red-flag carriers per week, on average, are caught before booking — double-broker domains, carriers with out-of-service authority, quotes from MCs that don't own the insurance.
• Dispatch never sees a carrier record they have to clean up. The one in Tai is the one Keelway wrote.

Brokers covering loads faster cover more loads. That is the entire business case.

Keelway deployment alongside Tai (under 2 weeks)

1. Day 1–2. Reply address issued, Tai API keys exchanged. Keelway starts reading replies to loads you post today.
2. Day 3–5. Your ranking weights get calibrated from your last 30 days of accepted quotes. A reefer brokerage and a flatbed brokerage should not see the same top five — and won't.
3. Day 6–8. Tai write-back goes live. First accepted carriers flow back into Tai load records automatically.
4. Day 9–12. Your first flagged "suspected double-broker" emails get labeled and Keelway's fraud detector learns the shape of your book.
5. Day 13+. Steady state. You move on with your week.

How this compares to Tai's existing "AI"

Tai has shipped several automation features over the last two releases — automated carrier reach-out, some quote capture, a light auto-booker. Those features assume carriers are responding onTai's integrated reply channel. In practice, most carriers still respond to the broker's Gmail inbox — the email address on the load posting — which sits outside Tai's workflow.

Keelway is specifically for that inbound Gmail stream. If a carrier replies inside Tai's channel, great — you don't need us for that reply. If they reply to your broker email, Keelway catches it, triages it, and merges it back into Tai. In most brokerages running Tai, 70–90% of carrier replies still come through the broker's Gmail, which is why this overlay produces the lift it does.

For the full capability breakdown independent of TMS, see Carrier Email Automation. For a direct Parade comparison from a Tai broker's perspective, see the Parade alternative page.