A shipper emails. A rated quote comes back.

The pipeline, step by step

Most quoting software assumes the request already lives in a form. For a small LTL carrier it doesn't — it lives in the inbox, written in a shipper's own words, missing half the fields a rating engine needs. Keelway's intake pipeline closes that gap in four stages, and a human owns the last one.

What gets extracted — and what stays yours to price

From a plain-language email, Keelway pulls the fields a rating engine actually needs:

• Pallets and pieces — handling units as the shipper describes them.
• Weight — total or per-unit, normalized to pounds.
• Lane — origin and destination, matched to your tariff geography (state or ZIP region).
• Dims and density — measured density when the shipper gives dimensions; a standard-pallet estimate when they don't.
• Freight class — suggested from density, always labeled suggested, always confirmable by a dispatcher.
• Accessorials — liftgate, residential, inside delivery, limited access, and the rest, flagged when the email mentions them.

Accessorials are the deliberate exception to automation: the AI flags them, your dispatcher prices them. If the email says “liftgate at delivery,” the worksheet carries a LIFTGATE-DELIVERY · FLAGGED line — and the charge comes from your accessorial rate table, entered by the person accountable for the price. The AI records what the shipper asked for; the human decides what it costs.

Filed in your pipeline, linked to the thread

A quote that lives only in a sent-mail folder isn't a quote — it's a rumor. Every quote Keelway drafts is filed as a record in your pipeline: the extracted shipment, the tariff and weight break that rated it, the flagged accessorials, and a link back to the originating email thread. When the shipper replies three days later, the context is already attached. When the month closes, you can see what you quoted, what you won, and on which lanes.

Drafted, never auto-sent — a control, not a limitation

An AI that emails prices to customers unsupervised is a liability with a login. Keelway drafts the reply and stops. The dispatcher reads it, corrects a class if the density estimate looks off, prices the liftgate, tightens the number on a competitive lane — then sends. Editing the draft is the expected workflow, not an override. The clerical work is gone; the pricing authority never moved.

Where a won quote goes next

When the shipper accepts, the quote becomes a shipment with a PRO number — shipper and consignee, pieces, pallets, weight, dims — without re-keying anything. From there it rides the rest of the Keelway LTL module: classification with live density, dispatch, linehaul scheduling, consolidation, POD capture, and accessorial billing. The rating engine that priced the quote is the same one that prices the invoice, so the number the shipper agreed to is the number they're billed.

Freight broker drowning in carrier emails?

That's our other agent. This page is about carriers selling LTL capacity — quoting shippers from their own tariffs. If you're a freight broker buried under 40 carrier replies per posted load, Keelway's carrier email automation does the mirror-image job: it extracts carrier rates from inbound replies, scores trust against FMCSA, and ranks the top five per load.