Before Connecting AI to Your Freight Inbox: 12 Questions for IT and Pricing

A freight pricing inbox holds more than shipment requests. A single thread can contain a customer's enquiry, an agent's buy rate, a revised quotation and an internal discussion about margin. Connecting AI to that inbox means deciding which parts of this commercial conversation it can access and act on.

Pricing needs to understand how the workflow will handle enquiries and prepare quotes. IT needs to verify the access, data handling and controls that make those actions possible. Both should review the same example, from the incoming email through to the message a customer receives.

Ask for the named mailboxes, folders, attachments and historical messages in scope. Does the connection cover a shared enquiry inbox or individual users' mailboxes too?

Establish whether access is restricted at the email provider or whether the application has broader access and filters what it processes. Those arrangements expose different amounts of information. Ask IT to verify the permissions actually granted.

Mailbox access and access inside the product need separate reviews. Once an enquiry is captured, can another office search it? Can a sales user see buy rates or margin discussions?

Ask for a role and branch permissions map, then test it with representative user accounts. Include vendor support access: who can view your records, for what purpose and with whose authorisation?

Request a data flow diagram covering email intake, document processing, model services, application storage and support systems. Identify the providers and processing locations involved, including any subcontractors handling your data.

An attachment may pass through several services before its contents appear in an enquiry record. Review that complete path against your organisation's requirements.

Get a written answer covering the application provider and each model service it uses.

Separate model training, service improvement, human review and temporary processing retention; an exclusion from training does not answer every data-use question. Confirm whether the terms apply to your subscription and deployment, and how changes to providers or terms will be communicated.

List the actions individually: create enquiry records, draft replies, modify messages, send RFQs, dispatch quotations or write to another system.

Agree the rules for acknowledgements, clarifications, vendor RFQs and customer quotations separately.

For a quote, review the selling price, terms, recipient and exact document version. Ask what happens if a charge, attachment or recipient changes after approval. The system should enforce the agreed policy on the message being sent, rather than rely on an earlier approval of a different draft.

External content can contain instructions intended to redirect an AI system, a problem known as prompt injection. For a freight workflow, an illustrative attempt might ask the system to forward a competing vendor's quotation to a new address.

Use this illustrative starting point for a joint IT and pricing review. Confirm what the selected product and email connection can enforce; the controls below are proposed requirements, not a statement of any vendor's default configuration.

Ask to reconstruct one enquiry from its original email to the sent quotation. The record should show the relevant source documents, rate and quote versions, user changes, approvals, recipients and timestamps.

Check whether failed actions and retries are recorded too. An activity label such as "quote sent" is insufficient if the team cannot establish which version left the business and who authorised it.

Ask for current evidence covering the proposed service, including how credentials are protected, administrator access is controlled and data is encrypted.

Where a SOC 2 Type II report is available, review its system scope, reporting period, exceptions and controls your organisation must implement. Connect the evidence to your deployment and assigned responsibilities.

Agree retention for emails, attachments, extracted records, audit logs and data held by downstream services. Ask how deletion works across active storage and backups, what is retained under an agreed policy and when removal is completed.

Name the people who can stop processing or sending, and ask them to demonstrate the procedure. Check the treatment of queued messages, retries and work already passed to another system. IT should also know how to revoke the connection.

Agree how pricing will resume manual work and how the provider will notify and support you if an incident affects enquiries or quotations.

Request a sample export before signing. Check whether it contains enquiries, original attachments, vendor responses, quote versions and relevant activity history, with identifiers preserving their relationships.

Agree formats, timing, charges and access after termination. Test whether your team can follow an enquiry using the export alone. A folder of PDFs may preserve final quotes while losing the commercial history behind them.

For each requirement, record whether it is provided by the product, enabled through configuration, dependent on your email environment or still requires implementation. Assign an owner to anything unresolved.