How NFI Is Operationalizing AI Across the Entire Transportation Management Stack

When FreightWaves launched the AI Excellence in Supply Chain Awards, the goal was to cut through the noise of an industry where “AI” has become a marketing buzzword slapped on every press release, and instead spotlight the companies that are leveraging AI in truly revolutionary ways. 

The awards recognize real deployments and measurable outcomes as opposed to flashy pitches. Entries are judged on the strength of the AI application itself, how deeply it’s integrated into existing workflows, and the tangible results it produces.

This year, NFI was named one of the honorees in the Operational AI Integration category for logistics companies. Specifically, the honor goes to the AI work embedded across NFI Transportation Management, the company’s managed transportation arm.

While many organizations showcase chatbot pilots or bolt-on AI features, few can demonstrate a coherent AI strategy that spans multiple functions, operates in production long enough to generate significant value, and measurably enhances human capacity.

Inside NFI’s AI Strategy: Build vs. Buy, and a Three-Pillar Framework

NFI Transportation Management describes its philosophy as a “build-versus-buy framework” designed to prioritize speed, ROI, and customer value over simply adopting whatever AI tool is trending. Rather than chasing a single flashy use case, NFI organized its AI investments into three categories that map directly onto where the technology creates the most leverage: Operational Support, Back Office Support, and Customer Value Add.

Operational Support is where NFI has attacked manual load tracking, one of freight’s most persistent pain points. Instead of associates manually checking in on freight via calls, emails, and portal logins, NFI deployed agentic AI that uses web scraping, email monitoring, and automated phone check-ins to track loads with minimal human intervention. The tool is already live for LTL freight and is being onboarded for truckload, and it’s saving 160 hours per week and growing. Alongside it, NFI built a natural language chatbot that gives associates instant access to SOPs and reporting, cutting down on formal training time, reducing help-desk tickets, and, according to NFI, improving employee satisfaction in the process.

Back Office Support is where the “eliminate the monotonous” philosophy shows up most clearly. Three tools do the heavy lifting here:

• An email triage and response system that uses agentic AI to process inbound freight bill correspondence automatically, saving 60 hours per week and growing, with more use cases already in development.
• A freight bill-to-load match exceptions tool, which trains a model to handle the tedious work of matching freight bills to the correct loads. That process historically required manual searching. Two of three planned phases are already live, saving 17-plus hours per week, with another 10 hours of potential savings identified as the third phase rolls out.
• An FBA aging app that automatically prepares aging reports for carriers on request, good for 15 hours per week in savings and a direct improvement to how carriers themselves are served.

Add it up, and all of this puts the back-office productivity gains at more than 100 hours reclaimed per week, plus the equivalent of four full-time employees’ worth of capacity freed from load-tracking duties alone.

Customer Value Add is centered on Navitrace, a global intelligence platform that serves as the engine for what the company refers to internally as its “Digital Twin.” The Digital Twin is a virtual replica of a customer’s transportation network, built from proprietary data and contracted rates, capable of running “what-if” scenarios on demand. This allows customers to model the impact of adding or removing carriers, compare contracted rates against market pricing, or evaluate consolidation strategies. Navitrace is designed to provide actionable insights rather than simply presenting complex dashboards.

NFI reports that the Digital Twin is uncovering an average of 5% to 10% in transportation savings per customer, with one client alone realizing more than $600,000 in annual savings. Alongside it, automated appointment scheduling has produced a 75% reduction in dwell time, directly cutting down on costly on-time, in-full (OTIF) fines for customers. That tool is live with some customers now and is expanding through the rest of 2026.

A Platform Built by Operators, for Operators

The development of Navitrace was a strategic response to a market saturated with cumbersome, one-size-fits-all visibility tools that often fail to reflect the nuances of individual shipper operations, such as varying accrual structures, budgeting approaches, and KPIs.

Navitrace utilizes a modular, microservices-based architecture designed for agility and seamless integration with emerging technologies. It is explicitly forward-looking, serving as more than a real-time reporting layer. As NFI notes, the Digital Twin is built to reveal scenarios that organizations might not have previously considered.

Proactive, tailored solutions are the basis of NFI’s entire submission, whether the tool in question is customer-facing or purely internal.

NFI describes the goal of its AI integration as “shifting the human-technology paradigm,” using automation to strip out friction and latency from repetitive tasks specifically so that people can move from reactive firefighting into proactive, strategic work. In practice, that deepens customer and carrier relationships, applies what the company calls “professional empathy” in carrier interactions, and aids in continuously optimizing the network.

AI conversations often skew toward replacement rather than reallocation, but NFI’s framing is part of what set this entry apart in a category that’s getting crowded fast, as every logistics provider races to claim its own AI story.

“What set NFI apart was that they could show their work,” said Adam Wingfield, FreightWaves’ Editorial Director. “Most entries in this category talk about AI in the abstract, but NFI came in with hours saved, dollar figures, and a clear read on what’s live versus what’s still in development. Concrete specificity is exactly what this award is supposed to recognize,” he said.

NFI hasn’t fallen into the temptation of leaning on a single flashy feature. The company has laid out several discrete tools, each with a clear goal, a documented deployment status, and a specific, quantified result. 

Congratulations to NFI Transportation Management on a well-earned honoree spot, and on doing the less glamorous, more difficult work of operationalizing AI across an organization.

Click here to learn more about NFI Transportation Management.