For decades, mid-market trucking fleets have grudgingly accepted a painful reality: Their transportation management systems handle about 80% of their rating needs. The remaining 20% demands spreadsheets, calculators and manual intervention.
BeyondTrucks CEO Hans Galland calls this the “last mile problem” in coding. His company’s new AI RateAgents aim to solve it by letting carriers build custom rate formulas without calling a single engineer.
The Limitations of Traditional Rate Tables
Rate tables are the functions that price every activity a carrier completes. This includes miles driven, detention tickets, fuel surcharges and accessorials. Ultimately, these charges determine what appears on a customer invoice. The challenge is that every shipper structures pricing differently.
“The carrier is at the behest of the shipper to accommodate those mathematical formulas in which they price their activity,” Galland said. “And so the challenge is really that built TMS functions are not exhaustive enough to cover all the gazillion permutations that exist in the market to calculate the stuff automatically.”
One result? Carriers with 100 to 1,000 drivers feel trapped. They can automate most billing through their TMS, but a stubborn slice requires manual work.
“So that leaves you, as you said, typically as a mid-market carrier, I can do 80% on TMS, but then there’s 20% I need to do in a spreadsheet or with a calculator,” Galland said.
Legacy TMS Providers and Custom Rate Table Costs
Legacy TMS providers have spent 40 years building rate table functionality. Part of that size and business model involves monetizing that complexity. When a carrier needs a custom formula embedded in their system, the process is neither quick nor cheap.
“They will take two weeks to turn around the quote. It will cost you $10,000 or $15,000, maybe $20,000,” Galland said. “And next time you upgrade the TMS, it will cost you another $15,000 in maintenance. And then they will take two or three months to actually generate it.”
The financial incentive to maintain this status quo is clear.
“[They] will not develop this. Why? Because they have revenue attached to this problem,” Galland said. “If they develop this, their revenue for custom engineering will go away.”
Galland compared the disruption to Amazon’s impact on traditional bookstores like Borders Books. Legacy providers have made carriers dependent on custom engineering services and monetized it heavily, while BeyondTrucks puts the customer first by placing power directly in the hands of the operators themselves.
How BeyondTrucks RateAgents Automate Fuel Surcharges
The fuel surcharge calculation illustrates just how arcane these formulas become. Galland walked through an example from a large cement company, showing how their carriers must calculate fuel surcharges based on regional Department of Energy indices.
“They say, well, to calculate the fuel surcharge, you actually will want to take the current diesel price in that region, deduct $2.27 per gallon, divide it by 2.27, and then multiply it by 14.1%,” Galland said. “Well, guess what? Once you go from [X] Materials to [Y] Materials or whatever it is, this looks very different.”
With RateAgents, carriers can paste contract language directly into the tool. The AI interprets the instructions, identifies the relevant DOE fuel indices and generates functional code.
“Think of a large language model like Claude or Gemini actually taking this instruction, which usually lives somewhere in the contract with the customer,” Galland said. “Now what it does, it says, OK, I generated the code.”
Users can review, test and modify the code before deploying it. The system validates security and confirms functionality before embedding the formula into the TMS.
Limits of AI in Mission-Critical Trucking Operations
Not everything should be left to AI. Mission-critical safety rules require “black and white” logic with zero tolerance for error.
“If you haul halal, the trailer must stay halal,” Galland said. “We have a customer that hauls chocolate. One of their specialty products is nut-free chocolate. Well, you don’t want to haul nut-containing chocolate before the nut-free chocolate gets loaded on the trailer because you’d kill someone.”
BeyondTrucks maintains traditional deterministic software for these scenarios while deploying AI to bridge the pricing complexity that rigid code cannot handle.
Mid-Market Fleets Gain Enterprise-Level Rate Agility
The implications go beyond operational efficiency. Mid-market carriers can now gain the pricing agility that previously required enterprise-scale investment.
“Knight Swift, you know, you work with Oracle, and Oracle probably gives you like 54 deployed engineers who will do this on payroll for you,” Galland said. “So Knight Swift doesn’t really need this.”
Fleets with 700 to 900 trucks, however, might have one overworked technical staff member. RateAgents allow individuals to do work that previously required 30 or 40 engineers. The agentic AI levels the competitive playing field, giving mid-market carriers the same API connections with shippers who demand sophisticated billing integration.
The company plans additional RateAgents applications beyond fuel surcharges.
Freight Fraud Symposium
Double brokering. AI deepfakes. Identity theft. Freight fraud is an existential threat to the industry. Get ahead of it.
Supply Chain AI Symposium
Past the hype. Join operators, founders, and enterprise leaders figuring out how to deploy AI in supply chain.
Future of Rail Symposium
Reshoring is rewriting freight demand. Join shippers, rail executives, and government officials to shape the next decade.
Double brokering. AI deepfakes. Identity theft. Freight fraud is an existential threat to the industry. Get ahead of it.
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame • Cleveland, OH Register NowPast the hype. Join operators, founders, and enterprise leaders figuring out how to deploy AI in supply chain.
The Old Post Office • Chicago, IL Register NowReshoring is rewriting freight demand. Join shippers, rail executives, and government officials to shape the next decade.
The Signal at Chattanooga Choo Choo • Chattanooga, TN Register Now