AI agents can now book freight through MCP

Between 17 September and 7 October, two freight forwarders and one company that sells transport management software opened their booking systems to AI agents. A shipper whose account is connected can ask a general-purpose AI assistant, in plain language, to search a rate, book a container and follow the shipment. All three connections use the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and all three companies state that the service is available now.

The largest of the three, a global forwarder, announced its connection on 29 September. According to the company, an agent can submit cargo details, book against the customer's negotiated rate and return a booking number and transit time, and the forwarder's own fleet of agents is already running in production.

The software company had opened its system on 17 September for quoting, booking and tracking, and the second forwarder followed on 7 October with ocean, air and ground freight.

MCP lets one connector serve every AI assistant

A model is the software, trained on large amounts of text, that reads a request and writes a reply. An assistant is the application built around a model, and an agent is an assistant that is allowed to take steps on its own, such as searching a rate, filling in a booking or checking a shipment every few hours and reporting back. An API, or application programming interface, is the entry point a company's system opens so that other software can read data from it or send it instructions.

MCP is an open standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data and tools sit. First published in November 2024, it has been looked after since December 2025 by the Agentic AI Foundation, set up under the non-profit Linux Foundation. Because the standard is shared, a forwarder builds one connector and every assistant that supports MCP can use it, instead of a separate integration for each assistant. The largest forwarder says its connector runs separately from its public API, with its own limits on the number of requests, so the integrations its customers already have are not affected.

The approval step sits in a different place on each system

On the largest forwarder's system, an administrator first enables the connection for the company, and each user then signs in once with their usual account to authorise the assistant. From then on the assistant can reach exactly what that person can reach in the forwarder's app and nothing more. The company says price, routing and cargo details are checked before an agent books against a rate it has found, that a booking made without a rate stays pending approval, without saying who approves it, and that every exception goes to a human expert.

On the second forwarder's system, the customer confirms each request inside the forwarder's own platform before the shipment is booked. The software company ties every call to an individual user, lets administrators switch access on for the company and for each user, and keeps its three actions that change data, creating a shipment, importing orders in bulk and cancelling a shipment, apart from eight tools that only read data, such as rate quotes and tracking.

Limits set inside these platforms, such as a user's permissions or a confirmation screen, apply to an agent in the same way they apply to a person. Approvals that sit outside the platform, such as a manager's sign-off by email or a company's purchasing rules, are not part of the connection and remain the company's own responsibility.

A freight cost from an agent needs the rate type and the date

The largest forwarder says its agents search "active contract and available spot market rates" for full container loads (FCL), shared container loads (LCL) and air freight. A contract rate is the price a shipper has negotiated for a lane over a set period. A spot rate is the market price for a single shipment on the day and changes from week to week. A freight cost reported by an agent means little until the buyer knows which of the two it is and on which date it was pulled, especially when it is set against a supplier's CIF offer.

Under FOB and CIF Incoterms for olive oil, the buyer arranges the main sea freight in the first case and the seller in the second. On an FOB purchase the agent that books is therefore the importer's, while on a CIF sale it is the exporter's.

Discharge valve of a flexitank fitted at the door of a dry container and connected to a hose

One container line accepts a loaded flexitank as special cargo only after it has received documents on both the cargo and the flexitank.

Bulk olive oil in a flexitank is special cargo

The three connections went live in the weeks around 1 October, when the 2026/27 olive oil season opened. That day Spain's agriculture ministry put the national crop at 1,602,596 tonnes, 23% above last season, in a first estimate that it describes as preliminary and open to revision. The outlook for the 2026/27 season covers the other Mediterranean producers.

Bulk olive oil often travels in a flexitank, a single-use bag of 16,000 to 24,000 litres fitted inside a 20-foot dry container. One container line lists edible oils among the cargo it carries this way, treats a loaded flexitank as special cargo and accepts it only after it has received documents on both the cargo and the flexitank.

None of the three announcements mentions food, refrigerated containers or bulk liquids such as olive oil shipped in flexitanks or ISO tanks, and none explains how a booking made by an agent handles a carrier's prior acceptance of a flexitank. The documents a food buyer checks before payment, such as a certificate of analysis for olive oil, are not part of any of the three connections either.

Five points to check before an agent books

Cargo coverage: whether the connector handles flexitanks, refrigerated containers and the carrier approvals they need, or only standard dry containers.
The approval step: where it sits in the forwarder's system and who in the company holds it.
The rate: contract or spot, and the date the agent pulled it.
Customs: the largest forwarder's customs audit rules, which a company writes from its own procedures and which check each entry before filing, are live for US entries only, with the Netherlands and the United Kingdom to follow at no stated date.
Evidence from outside the vendor: the largest forwarder says its wider AI-based automation processes 21 million tasks a year, but none of the three companies names a customer or publishes an error rate for bookings made by agents.